Photo: McLaren
After two and a half days, very productive, a failure hydraulic did abandon Button before time on the third day. The engineers of the british team worked on to fix it and, since falling the night, they discovered that it was a leak at the base of the power unit, as announced in a press release. However, instead of continuing with that engine, they decided to replace it so that Fernando Alonso could compete in the fourth and final session of the first week of workouts without any problems. Nothing could be further from the reality. Made three turns of setup, a new “abandonment”. Telemetry warned of a coolant leak, and goodbye to the program Thursday.
As described in the signature: “The leak had no relationship with the incident of the previous day and, as a result, there was no more remedy to remove the single-seater for the relevant tests. Unfortunately, the problem was such that could not be resolved until late in the afternoon and the team opted to finish the day early to ensure that the problem could be to investigate in depth and rectify”. Therefore, Alonso closed the fourth day of the test with only three installation laps and without measured time.
The Spanish did not attempt to conceal his disappointment, but tries to bring out the positive side:
The day of today has been disappointing after having started with very good foot the first two days of the tests. Even so, it is good news that the problem that has prevented us from rolling a lot today is not a very serious issue and can be corrected before the tests next week.
In total, we have completed a good amount of laps in these tests, so that we have a lot of data to analyze and learn from them. We will work hard this weekend to prepare for the coming week, with the aim of rolling the maximum possible time.
The head of engineering at McLaren, Matt Morris, he spoke as well about what happened:
Unfortunately, the coolant leak we have suffered has taken place in a complicated area, so we have taken longer than normal to locate it and fix it. It is frustrating when a small problem will stop without rolling during most of the day but, fortunately, this is something without much importance, and we can now start to prepare the car for the second test starting Tuesday, which comes. The tests serve to test and offer us the opportunity to identify and correct reliability issues before the season.
was Also of the opinion Yusuke Hasegawa, the new director of Honda in the Fórmula1:
Our time on the track has been severely limited by a leak that has required more time than expected to locate and rectify. To summarize our first four days of tests, we have had a good start and has confirmed the improvement of the deployment of ERS. However, the last few days have shown that there are parts of the reliability of the power unit that still have work to do to prepare for the race of Australia, and the subsequent events.
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