Manama // Lewis Hamilton steered his Mercedes to the fastest lap at Bahrain’s Formula One test session, where Red Bull’s pre-season woes continued on Friday.
Hamilton’s time of 1 minute, 34.263 seconds was quickest through three days at the Sakhir Circuit. His former McLaren teammate, Jenson Button, was more than seven-10ths of a second behind.
The Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo’s day ended after 28 laps because of mechanical problems, something that has dogged the defending champions all pre-season.
“We’re getting there,” said Ricciardo, who trailed Hamilton by more than six seconds. “It’s coming together bit by bit. We’d love a big chunk all at once, but obviously that’s not the way these things work, so we have to be a bit patient.”
Andy Damerum, the Red Bull race engineering coordinator, told the BBC that this latest issue was unrelated to any of the problems they had encountered in Spain.
“Because of its nature it means we have to take the car apart,” he said.
Hamilton said he cannot wait to get behind the wheel again.
“I’m looking forward to completing a race simulation next week,” the Briton said. “We’re trying to find any issues we can, now, to prevent them from happening during a race situation. So, from that perspective, it’s a positive that we were able to find and fix some things today.”
Lotus brought out red flags twice as teething problems with their E22 model continued.
“We had a number of gearbox-related problems,” said Alan Permane, head of Lotus’ trackside operations. “We have identified the issue and we have parts on their way.”
With Red Bull and Lotus each having issues, it was Caterham who completed the most laps of the Renault-powered cars, with Marcus Ericsson running 98 laps.
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