Lotus F1 have pulled out of the first test session at Barcelona after deciding to concentrate on rectifying the issue they found with the chassis during today's outing.
Romain Grosjean managed just seven laps around the Spanish circuit before telling the team the chassis wasn't responding as it should. They spent a long period in the garage working out the problem before notifying everyone via Twitter that they wouldn't be running for the rest of the day.
Technical Director James Allison gave some more information on the problem: “Before we were due to fly chassis E20-01 out to Barcelona in replacement of chassis E20-02 - damaged this morning - we ran a series of simulations at the factory based on the data provided by our brief running on track today," said the Briton.
"As a result, we were able to identify an area which requires some additional work. It will be more productive for us to carry out these modifications to both chassis at Enstone rather than send E20-01 out to this week’s test. We’ll put the right measures in place and we will be able to fix the problem before next week.”
Eric Boullier, Team Principal of Lotus F1 commented on the team's decision: “Not running this week has been a tough decision to take, but we feel that our choice is the right one," he said. "On the positive side, we have quickly identified the issue with the chassis and our design office has already devised a solution. We will be present at next week’s test in Barcelona. We draw faith from the fact that the E20 was quick out of the box in Jerez and showed its reliability there. We have a lot of work ahead of us over the next week but everyone at Enstone is ready for this challenge.”
Kimi Räikkönen will miss out completely following the team's decision, having been scheduled in for Thursday and Friday. The second, four day test in Barcelona is due to commence on March 1st.
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| Pos. | Driver | Time | Laps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  S. Vettel | 01:23.265 | 79 |
| 2. | N. Hulkenberg | 01:23.440 | 97 |
| 3. | L. Hamilton | 01:23.590 | 114 |
| 4. | D. Ricciardo | 01:23.618 | 76 |
| 5. | F. Alonso | 01:24.100 | 75 |
| 6. | M. Schumacher | 01:24.150 | 51 |
| 7. | S. Perez | 01:24.219 | 66 |
| 8. | B. Senna | 01:25.711 | 97 |
| 9. | H. Kovalainen | 01:26.035 | 31 |
| 10. | R. Grosjean | 01:26.809 | 7 |
| Full results | |||
| Lotus Renault | |||
|---|---|---|---|
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| More Lotus Renault photos | |||
| Formula 1 test at Circuit de Catalunya 21 February 2012 | |||
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| More Formula 1 test at Circuit de Catalunya 21 February 2012 photos | |||
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| More Formula 1 photos | |||
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