2018 Abu Dhabi Post-Season Test, Day 1

Valtteri back on track in Abu Dhabi for season-ending Pirelli tyre testing

Date:Tuesday 27 November 2018

Driver: Valtteri Bottas

Circuit:Yas Marina Circuit

Circuit Length:5.554 km

Laps Completed:120

Distance Covered:666.480 km

Best Lap Time:1:37.231

Valtteri completed 120 laps of the Yas Marina Circuit on Tuesday at the wheel of the championship winning Mercedes-AMG F1 W09 EQ Power+. The team returned to the venue of last weekend’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, testing Pirelli’s new range of tyres for 2019.

• The Finn set the second fastest time of the day, a 1:37.231, on the HyperSoft tyre
• He completed 120 untroubled laps of the Yas Marina Circuit (666.480 km)
• The main focus of the day was collecting data on the 2019 tyre compounds

Valtteri Bottas

Overall, a good day of testing here in Abu Dhabi. We completed our programme without any issues and we were able to do some long and short runs on a mix of the new Pirelli compounds. We can see some differences to this year’s tyres but we have all winter to work on understanding the new tyres from all the knowledge we are gaining from this test. I’m sure Pirelli will learn a lot from these two days of testing as well. We’ll be back on track tomorrow for the final time this year.

Andrew Shovlin

Today was about gathering data on the 2019 tyres and understanding how they differ to the 2018 tyres we’ve used this year. We’ll continue our programme with Valtteri tomorrow with more of a focus on the performance and degradation of each of the compounds.  This work is important as we need to select tyres for the early races based on the information we find at this test. It was a good day of running and the car ran without any issues.