Grosjean bounces back with testing P1 in Spain

Editor

Romain Grosjean put aside his Spanish GP woes to top the timesheets on the first morning of testing.

The Haas driver, who crashed out of Sunday’s race and took out Nico Hulkenberg and Pierre Gasly in the process, used the hypersoft tyres to clock a 1:1:8.449 on Tuesday morning.

That put him 0.094s up on Lewis Hamilton. However, the Spanish GP winner was on the soft tyres.

Mercedes trialed a new lighting system for their W09 in the morning’s session.

Instead of having only the one light at the rear of the car above the diffuser, the W09 sported lights on each of the rear wing endplates.

The new lighting system is designed to be used in wet conditions.

Max Verstappen was third quikcest on the medium tyres ahead of Carlos Sainz, who ran the softs.

Stoffel Vandoorne was fifth for McLaren with Formula 2 race winner Nicolas Latifi finally making his Force India debut and finishing the morning in sixth place.

Latifi was scheduled to test for the team during the pre-season but missed out due to illness.

Meanwhile McLaren and Force India were the only teams running two cars as Lando Norris and George Russell conducted tyre testing for Pirelli.

They were P9 and P11 respectively.