Mercedes asserted their dominance over the field yet again on the penultimate day of second Barcelona Test as Lewis Hamilton lapped the Circuit de Catalunya in a time of 1:23.022. The time was set during Hamilton’s first run on the 2015-spec Soft Pirelli PZero rubber. Mercedes lost the better part of their afternoon working on an “experimental” set-up while Hamilton focused on some Medium compound tyre running in the morning session.

The Mercedes lapped within a second of the cars that set their times during their own Qualifying simulations on the Red walled Pirelli Super Soft tyres, which again, raised a lot of heads in the paddock and many team principals and drivers experienced some shivers around the spinal region, if rumours are to be believed (Not really!).

Williams and Ferrari focused on qualifying style runs in the morning with both lapping within 0.014s of each other. Both these teams shifted to long run simulations in the afternoon with Kimi conducting a proper race simulation with an array of consisting times. Ferrari continues to show signs of improvement while Williams has emerged as the closest threat to Mercedes.

Daniel Ricciardo finished way down the timesheets, dead last to be precise about 2.2 seconds off the pace as Red Bull put their Camo-Bull RB11 on a day long, ‘long run plan’. The team is clearly worried about their race pace and some reliability problems with the Renault Power Unit.

McLaren Honda once again had a troublesome day which is a big disappointment for the team after such a high of yesterday. Kevin Magnussen, substituting for the recovering Fernando Alonso, completed just 39 laps and was forced to stop testing owing to an oil leak which ended McLaren’s day. The team was the only one along with Mercedes to not cross the 100 lap mark today.

The mid-field teams look fairly close on relative pace but the new Force India VJM08 completed a massive 158 laps today which is fairly outstanding considering the car was run for the first time just yesterday.

Romain Grosjean, Carlos Sainz Jr. and Marcus Ericsson for Lotus, Torro Rosso and Sauber respectively conducted late super soft tyre runs which bumped Hulkenberg’s time in the Force India that had been set earlier in the day.

Carlos and Marcus caused the only two red flags in a fairly straight forward day of testing at Barcelona.  The teams are back on duty tomorrow 9 AM, local time, Barcelona for the last day of Winter testing 2015.