Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

McLaren explains 'relatively minor' cause of problem

40

Share on..

McLaren's lack of running on the final day of the first test was due to a "relatively minor" problem, according to the team.

Fernando Alonso completed just three laps on Thursday morning before being confined to the garage for the rest of the day, failing to set a lap time on his second day in the car this year. Director of engineering Matt Morris explained that a coolant leak simply took a long time to access in order to be able to resolve.

“Unfortunately, the coolant leak we experienced on the car today was in a tricky position, which meant it took longer than usual to locate and fix," Morris said. "It’s always frustrating when a small issue hampers your running for much of a day, but thankfully it’s relatively minor and we can now look to preparing the car for the second test on Tuesday. Testing is testing, and it gives us the opportunity to identify and work on reliability issues before we start the season.

“Over the course of the first four days in Barcelona we’ve done a good amount of running and already learned a lot about our package, which should stand us in good stead for next week. We’re definitely ahead of where we were last year in terms of system checks and integration, so at the second test we’ll be able to focus more on race simulations and setup, as well as characterising our package’s performance.”

“We have a lot of data to go through over the weekend, and we look forward to getting back on track next Tuesday and continuing to get as much mileage under our belts as possible ahead of the first race in Australia.”

McLaren ended the week with a total of 257 laps completed, of which 203 were accumulated over the first two days of the test.

REPORT: Raikkonen fastest as McLaren completes just three laps

Day four of the first test as it happened

GALLERY: Pre-season testing

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.