Force India’s Sergio Perez was pleased to take to the VJM09 for the first time at the second day of the first test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
The Mexican completed 101 laps and set a best lap time of 1:23.650 to finish third behind the Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, who finished fastest for a second day.
Perez took over from the team’s development driver Alfonso Celis Jr. and was delighted with his first running in the car: “I’m pretty happy with my first day in the VJM09. Everything went according to plan and we covered lots of laps. The baseline of the car shows good potential and I’m already feeling quite comfortable with the car.
“There are still lots of things for us to explore on the aero and mechanical side, but we managed to complete almost the entire programme and we are definitely moving in the right direction.”
Chief Race Engineer, Tom McCullough, described the team’s programme further: “It’s been another solid day of work in Barcelona with Sergio covering 101 laps. A large part of the day included more aero correlation work and car sign-off tests.
“Sergio and his engineers also started to experiment with different set-ups while we continued to add more miles on the car. Sergio ran on the medium, soft and supersoft tyres during the day, giving us plenty of data for evaluation and comparisons.”
Perez’s team-mate Nico Hulkenberg will take over the Force India next before Celis Jr. returns to the car on Thursday.
