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| © Lotus |
Lotus has abandoned the second pre-season test after its run on the first day encountered a chassis problem that will keep it away from the Catalunya circuit this week.
The British team’s session ended early in the day after managing only seven laps and consequently announcing the conclusion of its outing.
“We completed a few aero runs and then started timed runs, but I was very quickly aware that the car wasn’t responding as it should,” reported Romain Grosjean.
The problem identified was with the new chassis, which got its first shakedown, with the team initially deciding to replace it with the one used at the first test at Jerez.
“Once the car was on track it was soon evident that everything wasn’t quite as it should be,” confirmed trackside operations director Alan Permane.
As a precaution, the new chassis was to be sent back to the team’s base at Enstone for further investigation but the decision to bring out the first one was put on hold to give the team enough time to rectify the situation.
“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,” said technical director James Allison.
“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,” he explained.
Lotus will however be present at the third and final test next week, also scheduled at Barcelona.
“Not running this week has been a tough decision to take, but we feel that our choice is the right one,” said team principal Eric Boullier. “On the positive side, we have quickly identified the issue with the chassis and our design office has already devised a solution.
"We draw faith from the fact that the E20 was quick out of the box in Jerez and showed its reliability there. We have a lot of work ahead of us over the next week but everyone at Enstone is ready for this challenge," he added.