Lotus to miss remainder of this weeks test at Catalunya to fix issues with the new E20
The Lotus F1 team has confirmed that it will sit out the remainder of this week's F1 test in Barcelona after running into problems on the first morning at Catalunya.
The team was forced to end its planned programme after just seven laps on Tuesday morning after
Romain Grosjean reported an issue with the chassis, with the team initially stating that it would switch to the chassis that had been used at
Jerez last week.
However, those plans have now been abandoned after simulations at the team's Enstone base revealed the need to carry out work on both cars built so far, with the team stating it was more productive to carry out the work away from the track than to take chassis E20-01 out to Spain.
“Before we were due to fly chassis E20-01 out to Barcelona in replacement of chassis E20-02 - damaged this morning - we ran a series of simulations at the factory based on the data provided by our brief running on track today,” 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.”
Team boss Eric Boullier admitted that the decision to skip the remainder of the test had been the correct one, with the team facing a busy week to prepare the car for the final pre-season session back at Catalunya starting next Thursday.
“Not running this week has been a tough decision to take, but we feel that our choice is the right one,” he said. “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. We draw faith from the fact that the E20 was quick out of the box in
Jerez and showed its reliability there. We have a lot of work ahead of us over the next week but everyone at Enstone is ready for this challenge.”
