Lotus withdraws from first Barcelona test

21/02/2012

Having identified a chassis problem which requires additional work, Lotus has pulled out of the remainder of the first Barcelona test.

During initial runs this morning with Romain Grosjean at the wheel of chassis E20-02, the team identified an issue with the chassis. After investigation at Enstone, initial plans to bring out chassis E20-01 to Barcelona have been held in order to give the team enough time to rectify the situation.

"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," said technical director, James Allison. "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."

"Not running this week has been a tough decision to take," admitted team boss Eric Boullier, "but we feel that our choice is the right one. 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."