Pirelli’s wet test concludes at Paul Ricard

Sebastian Vettel was fastest as Pirelli’s two-day wet tyre test concluded at the artificially soaked Paul Ricard track.

The day’s action ended early after the three teams present completed enough running to satisfy Pirelli’s requirements. The Italian company said: “Yesterday we tested in heavier wet conditions, today we simulated a drying track.” Between them the three teams completed 659 laps, for a total of 2326kms.

Having taken the 2015 Ferrari over from Kimi Raikkonen, who drove yesterday, Vettel set a best time of 1m.06.7s. He only just beat Dany Kvyat, who replaced Daniel Ricciardo at Red Bull. The Russian suffered a technical problem late in the day, having recorded 1m06.8s.

Meanwhile Stoffel Vandoorne set a best of 1m.07.7s for McLaren after losing time with an issue in the morning.

“As this was a ‘blind test’ the prototypes did not carry any colour markings on the sidewalls, and the teams and drivers did not know which specification of tyres they were testing,” Pirelli explained. “All the cars ran in unaltered 2015 specification.

“Temperatures remained consistently low throughout both days of the test, peaking at 11 degrees centigrade. Although these were not ideally representative conditions, a wide range of data was collected that will subsequently be analysed at Pirelli’s headquarters in Milan.

“The development programme will now continue back at base, when Pirelli will compare each team’s telemetry with its own data, in order to obtain a full picture of every prototype’s performance.”

The next major test with be with the 2016 cars at Barcelona on February 22^nd, although some teams may do filming days beforehand.