F1Minute - Bitesize Formula One News

The Sauber team were forced to make a late replacement for the still-recuperating Pascal Wehrlein after the German driver confirmed he was withdrawing from the first race of the year after two practice sessions. Wehrlein suffered a back injury in a Race of Champions crash in December, and now says: “My fitness level is not as it should be for a full race distance because of my training deficit."

We were all expecting the Mercedes team to continue their domination but Hamilton’s half a second head start over his teammate during FP1 and FP2 was still something of a surprise. Red Bull were best of the rest in the morning session, whilst Ferrari were holding back and letting the rest of the field clean up the dirty track.

Since Pirelli re-joined Formula One ahead of the 2011 season, we have become very familiar with Paul Hembery – the spokesperson in the paddock for the Italian tyre manufacturers. Hembery has handled the triumphs and the criticism in equal measure and with relatively good grace, but now it’s time for a change.

Pirelli have long argued that they haven’t been given enough time to fully test their wet tyre offerings, so today, the final test day this week, in Barcelona, they got a full day. The track was artificially dampened before the session began, and also at lunchtime, to keep the drivers running on the blue full wet tyres and the green intermediates wherever possible.

Although McLaren are gaining their fair share of headlines about mechanical issues during the first week of testing in Barcelona, it was Williams who had to curtail their programme at lunchtime on day two. The team completed a good first day with Felipe Massa behind the wheel – 103 laps with the third fastest time. Massa then handed the car over to rookie Lance Stroll who didn’t have quite such a good day.

The Sauber team have new faces all over the place at the moment – they’ve welcomed Pascal Wehrlein to the team for 2017, but he’s had to be deputised by Antonio Giovinazzi in testing due to injury. And now they’ve signed a new development driver, Tatiana Calderón for the 2017 season. The Colombian racer will combine her development driver duties with a stint in the GP3 series, which she also participated in last year.

Mercedes revealed the W08 today with Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas both getting the opportunity to take the new machinery out for a spin on a very windy and wet Silverstone track. The car looks good, fast, and doesn’t feature the shark fin we’ve seen at the other launches, instead a smaller t-shaped piece of carbon fibre is currently at the rear of the car.

Vijay Mallya made an appearance at the launch of Force India’s 2017 car today, and he wasn’t pulling any punches about the team’s optimism for the coming season. Sergio Pérez and Esteban Ocon were on hand to pull the covers off the VJM10 during the launch at Silverstone, revealing a car with a similar paint scheme to last year, the now expected shark fin, the lower rear wing, and an unsightly bump at the front of the car leading down to the nose.

With the launch of the R.S.17 today, Renault also confirmed two new drivers to their books – but it’s not what you think. Hülkenberg and Palmer are still gainfully employed but in addition, Sergey Sirotkin has been given the role of reserve driver which is a step up from his test driver duties of last season. He will participate in some Friday practice sessions and be on hand in case of emergency.

New Sauber driver Pascal Wehrlein has confirmed that he won’t be participating in the first pre-season testing in Barcelona, which gets underway in just over a week. The former Manor driver hurt his back during the Race of Champions in December, after an accident saw his car flip into a barrier.