Sebastian Vettel brought the curtain down on Infiniti Red Bull Racing’s pre-season test programme on Sunday in Barcelona, with an untroubled 100-lap run during which the team focused on race preparations. Afterwards the triple world champion said that after a successful winter the team is looking forward to the 2013 season opener in Australia in two weeks’ time.

“We’re in good enough shape I think. Overall testing has been good for us and we didn’t have too many problems,” said Sebastian. “But if you sum up all three tests I think all the teams were linked in to what the tyres could do and at times it was extremely difficult to read the set-up changes and find a direction because the tyres were always pretty challenging.

“In terms of how we did this week, well, over the past couple of days we maybe didn’t tick all the boxes that we wanted to but we have bit of time left to prepare before the seasons starts. The target is there to improve and we will do that. I’m looking forward to Melbourne now and can’t wait for the racing to begin.”

Race Engineering Co-ordinator Andy Damerum said: “We had a good day to finish off winter testing. We had the best conditions of the pre-season so we were able to get quite a lot done. We started with a whole session of data gathering today on some of the components we had put on the car. It was a tricky day because we were evaluating multiple aerodynamic elements, so it was pretty busy work. But not too bad for the final day.

“Testing overall has been good. It’s impossible to give any indication of where we are in the mix at the moment, to be honest. We think we’ve done some good work during all three tests but you never know until Saturday in Melbourne and that’s what we’ll focus on now.”

Photo by Infiniti Red Bull Racing