Testing Testing... 1, 2, 3

With the last test before Australia at Jerez in Spain all eyes were on the four teams still testing at this late stage. The last day when all four teams ran the times stood:

Unofficial final times from Jerez:
01. Jenson Button, Brawn BGP 001, 1:17.844
02. Nico Rosberg, Williams FW31, 1:18.071
03. Nelson Piquet, Renault R29, 1:18.382
04. Lewis Hamilton, McLaren MP4-24, 1:19.121

Again the Brawn was fasted for the umpteenth time in little over a week. With this sort of performance and only one mechanical failure they must be confident of bagging a fair few points this season maybe even a win in the opening races.

Williams and Renault seem to be consistently on the pace and will no doubt be squabbling for next best team with BMW behind Ferrari and Brawn by the looks of it.

Williams carried on running with McLaren for the next couple of days. McLaren were testing new aero parts. Noticeably they were running with ‘green goo’ which is painted on and moves so as to show the air flow. These paints are only usually used in the wind tunnel and maybe at the very beginning of testing to make sure things are running correctly. This is not the activity of a team which is fine tuning and actually ‘testing’. This has the look of desperation as they try to work out what’s happening to the air flow and why the rear wing isn’t working. After the final test they had improved but were consistently in the region of a second off the pace compared to the Brawn.

This is not a good sign for McLaren but we will have to wait and see how it all pans out in Australia. In a race situation we may well find things very different. This has been the case before when Honda looked good in testing a couple of years ago and failed to deliver at all in the season… You never can tell.