On the fourth and final day of the Barcelona Testing, Lotus and Mercedes showcased strong performances as  McLaren’s fortunes just went bad to worse. Their driver of the day, Fernando Alonso lost the car between Turn 3 and Turn 4, colliding heavily. The car lost the front wing but the suspension and nose seemed intact. Alonso had to be airlifted to a hospital for health checks, but walked away without any injuries. The team couldn’t repair the car on time and hence their lap count for the day was stuck at 20 laps, which Alonso set before crashing 20 minutes before Lunch.

Lotus continued their good run. After topping the charts on day 1 and day 3, Romain Grosjean ensured that Lotus E23  was again on top with a 1:24.067, completing 110 laps. He set the fastest lap on Pirelli’s super soft tyres though.

Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg unleashed the true pace of the car today with a best time of 1:24.321 which he set using the medium tyres which are 2s off the pace from the super softs used by Grosjean to set his fastest lap according to Pirelli. He had a poor start to the day though, by spinning in the gravel but later recovering to finish  129 laps in total.

Dannil Kvyat in the Red Bull again managed to get 100 plus laps-102 in total, as Red Bull recovered from the poor first test in Jerez. The Russian’s fastest time was 0.6s off Rosber’s pace but was set using the soft tyres, which clearly looks like a cause of worry for the Red Bull.

Ferrari had a pretty dull day. Sebastien Vettel was seventh fastest and only managed 74 laps in the day- a tally which is pretty less compared to what they’ve been doing on other testing days

Sauber also had a difficult day with very little participation in the morning session owing to multiple issues with the car. Felipe Nasr returned to the car after lunch and was able to increase the lap count to 73 setting the fourth fastest time of the day on super soft tyres. He also caused a red flag 10 minutes before the end when his car stopped in between.

Valtteri Bottas in the Williams managed a very strong total of 127 laps setting the fifth fastest time in his Williams FW-37 . Carlos Sainz Jr in the Torro Rosso topped the morning session but later finished at sixth position managing 88 laps. He also crashed at Turn 3 after the lunch break, bringing out the red flags, after which he didn’t continue. Nico Hulkenberg driving previous year’s Force India could only complete 36 laps suffering a rare Mercedes engine failure. He was ninth in the time charts.

With not even a month left to the Australian Grand Prix, teams just have the final Barcelona testing to try and test their car, which starts the coming Thursday. This test will be particularly crucial for McLaren after a poor performance in the previous two tests. Much like the current testing, we at ES will have you covered!

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