Oliver White
McLaren shared testing duties today at Monza between their two drivers Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. Hamilton took to the MP4-22 during the morning, while team mate Alonso went out after lunchtime. It was the Spaniard who managed to set the fastest lap around the historical circuit, and the pair were comfortably quicker than the BMW of Nick Heidfeld.
As for McLaren’s main rivals in the championship chase, Ferrari could only muster a paltry fifth place in the timing sheets with Kimi Raikkonen. Kimi was 0.6s down on the McLaren’s, and Turkish Grand Prix winner Felipe Massa is scheduled to take over for tomorrow.
Heikki Kovalainen was pumped up after a good run in his Renault, and feels as though the R27 is well-balanced.
We worked hard so that by the end of the day, the R27 was well-balanced. I think this will be a good baseline to work from on Friday at the Grand Prix, and at that time, we will focus on fine-tuning the set-up to extract the final tenths of a second for the race. Heikki Kovalainen.
Christian Klien went out today for Honda, and managed to go faster than his ex-employee Red Bull, who finished the day in tenth with Mark Webber. Takuma Sato and Adrian Sutil rounded out the twelve drivers running, and only a brief rain shower during lunch affected the test today.
| 1. | Fernando Alonso | McLaren | 1m23.155s |
| 2. | Lewis Hamilton | McLaren | 1m23.454s |
| 3. | Nick Heidfeld | BMW | 1m23.725s |
| 4. | Jarno Trulli | Toyota | 1m23.759s |
| 5. | Kimi Raikkonen | Ferrari | 1m23.773s |
| 6. | Heikki Kovalainen | Renault | 1m24.093s |
| 7. | Sebastian Vettel | BMW | 1m24.266s |
| 8. | Alex Wurz | Williams | 1m24.356s |
| 9. | Christian Klien | Honda | 1m24.595s |
| 10. | Mark Webber | Red Bull Racing | 1m24.701s |
| 11. | Takuma Sato | Super Aguri | 1m24.976s |
| 12. | Adrian Sutil | Spyker | 1m25.278s |
It was interesting that a lot of the online media led with the story that Hamilton was top on the first day, implying that he was clearly the fastest driver in F1.
But what they left out was that Alonso hadn’t turned a wheel that day!
With Alonso having a run in the afternoon today, he likely had the better of the running – would be interesting if they ran both cars to get a more realistic comparison.