The Haas F1 Team managed to score a notable victory of sorts on the first day of testing in Bahrain, with Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen completing 148 laps in total during the eight hours of track time.
Thats even more than Max Verstappen, who put in 143 laps all by himself in the Red Bull, having opted for a full day in the cockpit.
Haas had no significant issues during on Wednesday, and new team boss Ayao Komatsu was happy with how their first back back in action in 2024 had gone for them.
"For our first day of pre-season testing, overall, I think it was a pretty decent day,." he said after the chequered flag brought proceedings to a close. "It wasn’t perfect, but it was a really decent start.
"We focused the whole day on long-run tire management, we generated really good data. Both drivers ran a few different strategies, and we can see the results of that.
"We’ve learned quite a lot as a team," he continued. "I’d say we managed to achieve most of our objectives for the day, which is good. For tomorrow we’ve got another big set of objectives, knowing what we’ve learned from today.
"We have a few operational things to sharpen up as well, just so we run slightly better, but with 148 laps recorded, we now have plenty to build on for Thursday."
Magnussen was in the seat in the morning with Hulkenberg taking over after lunch. They were the slowest drivers on the timing screens, both more than four seconds off the pace set by Verstappen, but were feeling positive all the same.
"I feel very good. Physically, it was a good morning as it’s always fun getting back into the car after the winter," said Magnussen. "I think we had a pretty positive morning,.
"We focused on long runs and we’re really trying to address the issues that we had last year with the tyres," he explained of the apparent lack of pace today compared to their rivals.
"That’s going to be our main focus and we’re happy about what we saw this morning, but there’s clearly a lot of work to do," he added. "But everyone’s fired up to investigate and learn about this new car."
"Our afternoon was mainly about high-fuel, long runs,? confirmed Hulkenberg for his part. "The objective was to learn about the car and try some things with the tyres.
"We know it was our weakness last year so that’s really been the focus today. It was all good and positive, there were no issues on the technical side and with 82 laps on the board, everything was achieved."
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