Red Bull and McLaren hit by gremlins at first F1 test

Red Bull and McLaren both suffered frustrating early problems on the first day of 2017 F1 testing in Barcelona, seriously restricting their mileage.

Both Daniel Ricciardo and Fernando Alonso did virtually no running in the morning, and both men only got out again late in the afternoon session.

Teams have a total of only eight days of testing this year, with the fourth – on Thursday this week – devoted to wet running.

“We haven’t done too much,” said Red Bull’s Christian Horner. “We had a few issues this morning. We had a mechanical issue regarding an engine sensor. Having rectified that unfortunately there’s been a battery issue subsequent to that which necessitated a battery change, and that’s caused quite a bit of downtime.

“I’d far rather have the problems here than at the first race, but the good news is that they don’t seem to be major problems. Also the encouraging fact is that both other cars powered by the same power unit are running reasonably OK. So one can only assume it’s just been unlucky that Daniel’s had two issues on his car today.”

The only comfort for McLaren is that the team had already done 100ks of filming day running on Sunday with the MCL32. After suffering an oil leak, the team decided to change the power unit.

“We had an oil system problem,” said team boss Eric Boullier. “That’s all that we know now. They are investigating what’s going on, and they will know later. and Honda I guess will tell us what happened. It’s obviously disappointing because yesterday we had a filming day, we did our 100kms and more or less everything went right. This morning it came as a bit of a surprise to have a problem with this PU.”