Barcelona Testing – Esteban Ocon was happy with his first day in the car at pre-season testing, despite joining the session late.
It was two hours before the Frenchman took to the track, as Force India were fixing the exhaust issue which kept team mate Sergio Perez in the garage for most of Monday afternoon.
“We had a cracked exhaust. We were finding a way to repair it, it took a bit of time this morning,” he said.
“We covered most of our programme and it was ok.”
Once on the track, however, Ocon enjoyed a largely trouble-free day.
“Today went well. I think we managed to cover a good amount of laps,” he said.
“We had a system oil leak before lunch but at the end we managed to do 85 laps, take a direction of working as well and it’s good overall. I’m happy with it.”
Chief Race Engineer Tom McCullough was relieved to have had a better day after a troubled start to pre-season testing:
“It was a much smoother day than yesterday with good reliability allowing us to cover 86 laps with Esteban,” he said.
“We finished off the systems checks this morning as Esteban became comfortable with the new car and then moved straight into the aero programme, which we had started yesterday with Sergio.
“Esteban’s feedback led us in a good direction with rebalancing the car and he also ran on a variety of tyre compounds including supersoft, soft and medium.
“I’m pleased we managed to exceed our target lap count and accrued so much data because the learning curve is so steep in these early days.”
Test driver Alfonso Celis Jr. will drive the VJM10 on Wednesday, with Perez and Ocon sharing the final day of the test.
