Circuit de Catalunya: Testing Day One

On the opening day of the first Barcelona test, Red Bull revealed some impressive pace with reigning double world champion holding quickest lap with a 1:23.265.  With the top 7 drivers only being less than a second apart, Vettel set his top time on the hard compound (which only leads to believe that the RB8 still has plenty of speed yet to come).

Unlike Jerez testing, there was only one red flag in day one at Barcelona. Daniel Ricciardo brought out the red flag in the afternoon session when his Toro Rosso came to a halt on turn 8. What the team called a 'technical problem', the STR07 dropped out of any further running in the lats hour on day one.

On a less favourable note, Caterham's Heikki Kovalainen suffered a rear track rod failure in the morning session and was only able to rejoin the running with 40 minutes left. It was a great show of the team and was good enough to bring Kovalainen's lap total up to 31.

Romain Grosjean was the driver with bad luck on day one. After only 7 laps on track, a problem with the Lotus E20's chassis was to blame in counting Lotus out of the remainder of running in Barcelona.

"Before we were due to fly chassis E20-01 out to Barcelona in replacement of chassis E20-02 - damaged this morning - we ran a series of simulations at the factory based on the data provided by our brief running on track today," technical director James Allison said. "As a result, we were able to identify an area which requires some additional work. It will be more productive for us to carry out these modifications to both chassis at Enstone rather than send E20-01 out to this week's test. We'll put the right measures in place and we will be able to fix the problem before next week."

Though still running in the 2011 MVR02, Charles Pic was the slowest on track and yet also the most respectable. On his first day of testing this year, the young Frenchman put on a vast display of reliability and fitness while running a full 121 laps.

For a full set of day one at Catalunya, be sure to check out Octane Photo's amazing gallery here!

Times

	Driver	Car	Time	Laps
1.	Sebastian Vettel	Red Bull RB8	1:23.265	79
2.	Nico Hulkenberg	Force India VJM05	1:23.440	97
3.	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren MP4-27	1:23.590	114
4.	Daniel Ricciardo	Toro Rosso STR07	1:23.618	76
5.	Fernando Alonso	Ferrari F2012	1:24.100	75
6.	Michael Schumacher	Mercedes W03	1:24.150	51
7.	Sergio Perez	Sauber C31	1:24.219	66
8.	Bruno Senna	Williams FW34	1:25.711	97
9.	Heikki Kovalainen	Caterham CT01	1:26.035	31
10.	Romain Grosjean	Lotus E20	1:26.809	7
11.	Charles Pic	Marussia MVR02	1:28.026	121