Testing is over, two weeks to go before the first race and no one has a clue about which team has an edge, if any. Opinions keep changing every day, and even an experienced hand like Schumacher can't seem to make up his mind. His team was slow, then it got competitive and today Mclaren looks very strong to him, when two days back he had marked Alonso and Massa as the drivers to beat this season. A lot of sand bagging done by pretty much all the teams, some might have done more so than others. The fastest lap time around Barcelona in winter testing last year was a 1:19:1 something set by Button. Fastest time during the GP weekend was by Barrichello in Q2, when he set a time of 1:19:8ish. The cars should be slower this year but by almost 1.2 seconds? I doubt that.
Anyone who did a lap slower than a 1:20:5 would not have made it into Q3 last year. Last year at Barcelona;
Drivers eliminated in Q2
11. Kazuki Nakajima, Williams-Toyota, 1′20.531
12. Nelson Piquet Jnr, Renault, 1′20.604
13. Nick Heidfeld, BMW, 1′20.676
14. Lewis Hamilton, McLaren-Mercedes, 1′20.805
15. Sebastien Buemi, Toro Rosso-Ferrari, 1′21.067
Interestingly, Mercedes, in the hands of Nico Rosberg, put in a pretty quick time yesterday but James Allen, writing in his blog gave Rosberg's best sector times on the couple of laps he did when he got his fastest time, which makes Rosberg's time even more impressive.
This is what he wrote.
Rosberg set the fastest time of the day a 1m 20.686, but if you look carefully you see that this not a representative time either, the Mercedes was actually faster than that. On his hot lap, the second lap on a three lap run, Rosberg set his fastest time in only the second sector, the lap before was 2/10ths quicker in Sector 1 and on a later lap he was two tenths quicker in Sector 3, so in fact the Mercedes’ ideal fastest lap yesterday was a 1m 20.2, which is pretty quick.