Lotus made it through just seven laps on the first day of testing at Barcelona on Tuesday, after Romain Grosjean said that there was a problem with the car. The team quickly stopped the running and retired for the remaining test session, but despite the cool approach fromthe team, the problem could be much worse, than first anticipated.
On the official Facebook page, Eric Boullier said that retiring the car was a “tough decision, but we feel that our choice is the right one”.
He added: “On the positive side, we have quickly identified the issue with the chassis and our design office has already devised a solution. We will be present at next week’s test in Barcelona.”
The team had originally planned to have the first chassis shipped to Barcelona for tomorrow, but they changed their plans after running some computer analysis on the two chassis.
Lotus technical director James Allison, said: “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.”
That sounds comforting enough, but as a few observers have noticed, you don´t just pull out of a pre-season test, unless there is a much more serious issue. and that is exactly what BBC F1 technical analyst Gary Anderson, the former technical director of the Jordan, Stewart and Jaguar teams, said:
“To abort the test suggests this is a bigger problem than Lotus are admitting – and with the F1 winter test programme being cut from 16 days to 12 this year it does set them back. They have decided against flying the first chassis out so they have obviously discovered a problem with that too.
“You would have thought they could have fixed it overnight – chassis are made of carbon-fibre composite so you’d be looking to bond new strengthening parts on. That would have enabled them to run on Thursday and Friday, which would have been valuable miles on the new car.
“In my experience, if you can’t do it in 24 hours, I don’t think you can do it at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if this meant they needed a new chassis, which would make it touch and go for the first race.
“They’ll have a third chassis under way, but you can’t make a chassis overnight – you could probably compress it into three weeks if you really pushed it. If it is that serious, that could mean one new car for one driver in Melbourne and the other driving one that is patched up as well as possible.”
