It’s truly been a case of man vs. machine in pre-season testing so far. The immense mileage that the Silver Arrows have clocked up at the Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya has meant that the Mercedes AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team had to split the driving duties between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg equally on day three yesterday, to guard against injury, and keep their drivers in the best possible shape.
Lewis and Nico have racked up an immense 328 laps over the first two days of testing – covering around 1522km – put into context, this is roughly the same distance you’d need to cover by road if you drove from the team’s headquarters in Brackley, UK, to the Spanish circuit on the outskirts of Barcelona.
“Two drivers doing half days will do better work compared to 160 or 170 laps from one person,” explained Nico. “We want to get the maximum out of the very few testing days we have this year, so to me it makes perfect sense. “It’s amazing to see that the car is already so reliable and we started trying some basic set up changes this morning too. It was good to split the time on track with Lewis. The car is able to do so many laps, so I think it’s probably a more effective way of doing things.”
Lewis continued: “We’d spoken about splitting the driving beforehand, so it wasn’t a surprise. I was happy to do full days – but they are long days, so the team felt it best to mix things up to keep us both fresh. I feel great now – but yesterday I was a bit sore. It’s a bit like going to the gym when you haven’t been for ages. If you do a hard workout straight away, you’ll be in pain afterwards. For your neck in particular, it doesn’t matter how hard you train during the winter, driving just hits it in a different way that you can’t really simulate.
“It’s quite cool being out on track with the other new cars. Your gut reaction is to try to get close and see how they perform through the corners and along the straights. But that’s a waste of time, really, so you have to resist! In any case, we’ve had a great start to testing as a team so far.”
Lewis will take the wheel of the F1 W07 Hybrid tomorrow morning, Nico Rosberg in the afternoon for the fourth and final day of the opening pre-season test.
Credit Monster