Lewis completes 77 laps on a wet first day of testing at the Bahrain International Circuit

Date:                           Tuesday, 2 April 2019

Driver:                         Lewis Hamilton

Circuit:                        Bahrain International Circuit

Circuit Length:            5.412 km

Laps Completed:         77

Distance Covered:       417 km

Best Lap Time:             1:31.156

Following the Bahrain Grand Prix, Formula One teams have remained in Bahrain for this year’s first in-season test. Lewis Hamilton was behind the wheel of the Mercedes-AMG F1 W10 EQ Power+, completing 77 laps on the opening day.

Lewis Hamilton

We were driving on the same track we drove all weekend, but due to the conditions we faced completely different obstacles today. Both the temperatures and the wind were different to what we experienced last week, which is why this is actually quite a cool track to drive as it brought some variation.

Andrew Shovlin

The rain was a bit of a surprise! It wasn’t forecast but ended up costing us four or five hours of our programme. We selected the tyres for this test back in December and not expecting rain, we chose only dry tyres. So, once the track was properly wet we didn’t have any option but to wait for it to dry again. However, it’s not been a wasted day, we got through a few aero items in the morning and have managed to collect useful data on some development items. We’re going to reorganise our plans a bit for tomorrow, we’re not going to manage to get everything done that we hoped but with decent weather we should be able to cover most of it.