Bottas tops Tuesday morning test times

Bottas begins to flex Mercedes' muscle

On a frigid morning in Barcelona Mercedes' Valtteri Bottas topped a quiet second morning of Formula 1 pre-season testing as almost no one went out for the first 3 hours.

Overnight sleet made for cold conditions at the start of running at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with the track temperature recording at just 2.8ºC at 9 a.m., prompting teams to only complete a handful of installation laps in the opening hours.

Temperatures rose marginally through the day, prompting race control to extend the session by one hour by scrapping the planned lunch break, giving teams the chance to make the most of the warmer conditions.

Bottas completed the most laps of anyone during the morning for Mercedes in the W09 Hybrid car, with a fastest time of 1:20.270 giving him P1 by 0.055 seconds ahead of McLaren's Stoffel Vandoorne in second place, but his time was on the hypersoft tires so that is over a second of lap time the McLaren really does not have.

Bottas recorded his fastest lap of the morning on the soft compound tire, and will hand over to teammate Lewis Hamilton for the afternoon.

Sebastian Vettel was third overall as he enjoyed his first extended run behind the wheel of the new Ferrari SF71H car, lapping one second off Bottas' time, while Carlos Sainz Jr. took P4 for Renault.

Sergey Sirotkin ended the morning fifth for Williams, racking up 37 laps as the team fitted a number of sensors to the FW41 car to gain additional data. Esteban Ocon took sixth for Force India as he got his first taste of the new VJM11 car.

Tuesday Morning Times