Charles Leclerc finished the final test day of the season for Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow a couple of hours earlier than planned, after he crashed into the barriers at Turn 14. He emerged unscathed, however there was quite a bit of damage to the SF90. Once the extent of the work required to get it track worthy again had been assessed with the car back in the garage, it was decided to call a halt to the Abu Dhabi test. Up until then, Charles had completed 103 laps, almost double the race distance from Sunday’s Grand Prix, giving the team plenty of data.
Morning. As was the case yesterday, when Sebastian Vettel was in the cockpit, Leclerc began by driving around 20 laps with various measuring devices fitted to the car. On the stroke of ten, the test then became exclusively limited to tyre evaluation and Leclerc started a series of runs, comparing the 2019 tyres and the compounds Pirelli is working on for 2020.
Lunch break. The morning programme ended at noon, at which point various components that had reached the end of their life were replaced, before getting the car back out on track at 13h00. Charles continued work on tyre evaluation, with short and long runs to evaluate them in all conditions.
Over 100 laps. Leclerc and his SF90 covered a total of 103 laps, the best in 1’37”401 on the C5 compound, which ended up being the second fastest time of the day behind George Russell in the Mercedes. The crash at turn 14 came around 16h00 when the driver lost control going over a kerb, thus ending the year of track activity for Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow. The F1 cars will be back in action for the first day of pre-season testing on 19 February 2020, at the Barcelona-Catalunya circuit.
Charles Leclerc #16
“This was our last day on track and I think it was useful, despite the accident which meant I had to stop early. We did a lot of comparison testing of the 2020 tyres up against this year’s and acquired a lot of data which will now be analysed in depth.
Now we can switch off for a while, but I will never forget my first season with Scuderia Ferrari and I’m sure that it won’t be long until I want to be back on track.”