BARCELONA: Sebastian Vettel continued to show good pace with Ferrari in Formula One’s preseason testing on Tuesday, setting the fastest time in the morning session.
Vettel was nearly a second faster than Daniel Ricciardo of Red Bull, the only other top driver to go out on Pirelli’s new ultra-soft tire compound.
Vettel’s time of 1 minute 22.810 seconds at the Circuito de Barcelona was almost two seconds quicker than the pole position in Spain last year. Vettel also was fastest on Monday, ahead of defending F1 champion Lewis Hamilton.
Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg, testing for the first time on Tuesday, was third on medium tires, two seconds slower than Vettel’s time. Rosberg ran 81 laps, the most of any driver. Vettel ran 46. Hamilton had driven 156 laps in total on Monday.
Two-time champion Fernando Alonso made his debut in testing by driving 71 laps, another promising sign for McLaren after a disappointing season last year. Teammate Jenson Button had completed a total of 84 laps on Monday without any major reliability problems. Alonso was only 10th fastest among the 11 drivers on the track on Tuesday, though.
Sergio Perez was fourth with Force India and Marcus Ericsson fifth with Sauber, which will only debut its 2016 car when teams return to Barcelona for the final tests of the season on March 1-4.
Esteban Gutierrez drove for newcomer Haas, finishing ninth after staying in the pits for the first hour-and-a-half of the test session. Haas, the first American-led team in F1 since 1986, had to reinforce its front wings after a failure in the car driven by Romain Grosjean on Monday.
A red flag came out near the end of the session when Max Verstappen stopped on Turn 13 with a mechanical failure in his Toro Rosso. The car had to be towed back to the garage.
Indonesian driver Rio Haryanto was scheduled to make his debut for Manor on Tuesday, but the team changed plans and said it decided to keep German Pascal Wehrlein in the driver’s seat the entire day. Wehrlein was seventh fastest.
