The Aston Martin squad had their fair share of problems during three days of pre-season testing, and were quite far off the pace as they focused on long distance runs. Even so, they insist they're not worried by how things went in Bahrain.
In his first track time with the team since moving from Ferrari over the winter, four-time champion Sebastian Vettel suffered the brunt of disruption experienced ed by the team. He completed only ten laps on Saturday and was also forced to finish early on Sunday after suffering a turbo power issue.
"We got plenty of laps on the board today, despite an early finish," he said afterwards. "My running today was very useful and the track conditions were better, so that was a big help in understanding this car.
“At this stage, every lap is extremely important to understand the car, to understand how the car wants to be driven, to figure out the differences of my past and my future, etc.
"We have to learn obviously a great deal about the car still, when it comes to set-up and so on," he acknowledged. "There’s still a lot that I can improve and there’s still a lot that we can improve.
“But I think everybody’s in the same position because with three days of running it’s impossible to get everything in. I think for us the first couple of races will be, especially for me, a steep learning curve, but we’ll take it from there.
"I’m excited to keep progressing with the car. I’m looking forward to racing here in Bahrain in two weeks," he added.
©AstonMartin
Team principal and CEO Otmar Szafnauer said that it had been "“a pretty busy week where we learned a huge amount despite a few challenges here and there – including a sandstorm on Friday!
"Between them, Lance and Sebastian covered a total of 314 laps this week and we’ve now got a vast amount of data to digest before we come back here for the race.
"We lost a bit of track time with some technical issues over the weekend, especially for Sebastian yesterday, but that’s one of the reasons why we go testing.
"One of the main tasks this week was to continue helping Sebastian settle into the team and we’ve made a lot of progress already."
Szafnauer said that Stroll had managed more uninterrupted track time which would benefit the team as a whole moving forward.
"Lance was able to conduct our programme as planned this morning, gaining some useful data on the long runs, race simulations and shorter runs," he explained. "It leaves us well placed to come back here for the race later this month.”
"I’m very happy with today’s work," reported Stroll for his part. "We ran to our programme and collected lots of useful data by doing race simulations and long runs.
"We completed our job list for the day, which is a really good way to end the test after we lost out on a bit of running yesterday.
"We’ve got plenty of data to go over now to improve our understanding of the car, so that’s a nice position to be in especially considering there were only three days of testing this year.
"We can go away now and make more improvements before we come back for the race.”
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