Caterham caught the eye at Jerez on Wednesday when Heikki Kovalainen ran more laps than any other driver, the new CT01 showing impressive reliability as the team got to grips with KERS for the first time.
The Finn – who has just signed a management deal with IMG – completed few laps on Tuesday after a niggling problem stopped the car, but he was happy with his subsequent running.
He handed the car over to third driver Giedo van der Garde today, prior to Jarno Trulli’s debut with it on Friday.
“Actually the problem was not really with the car, once we fixed the heating issue with one of the electronic boxes underneath the bodywork,” said Kovalainen of Tuesday’s drama. We just couldn’t start the car, we had a strange starter issue. We fixed that overnight, and once we were able to start the car it went really well, we didn’t have an issue and were able to do some set-up changes, also working on the KERS all day.
“For me it was running really well. I was expecting some troubles, I had some experience in the past from McLaren, and I remember the early days there it was not easy to get it running, and Red Bull has provided a really good system.
“It was running faultlessly all day, and I was quickly back in the habit of using it, and we were just able to monitor different temperatures and see how the batteries are living their life underneath the car, and all fine.”
Kovalainen said that he already felt that the team was in better shape than last season.
“From what I’ve seen from the team we are better prepared than other years and the car is better prepared. Last year we were missing some parts in the suspension and we had some power steering issues, and now we had a complete car here and I was expecting to be able to this kind of day already yesterday.
“It’s been good that we’ve been able to do it and out some more miles on the car and hopefully pick up some more problems. Once we’ve fixed the second wave of problems then normally the car is reliable. Hopefully we can do that before Melbourne.”
Kovalainen also pronounced himself happy with the overall feel of the CT01: “For me the car has been very easy to set-up. It has a more stable rear end than last year’s car, which is something that I wasn’t expecting to be as good as last year, because we’ve lost the blown diffuser. I think the car actually has a better rear end in the high speed.
“The main issue is a little bit of a last turn-in to the slow corners, but we’re still running last year’s front wing, for example. We have a new one coming later on, and we’ll get some more power to the front of the car. That will make it quicker. And it seems that the rear end is working really well.
“Just looking the timesheets we’re closer than we’ve been before. We’ve done proper running, we haven’t done any show runs, so fingers crossed.”
Adam Cooper F1 