Kubica highlights C39 progress in a week

For his second half-day at the wheel of theAlfa Romeo C39 powered by the block Ferrari, Robert Kubica will have set the best time this Wednesday, completing a lap of the Catalan track in Barcelona in 1'16"942, the only one under the 1'17" mark per lap.

A performance to put into perspective since the absolute best time of these winter runs is far from having been beaten, since Valtteri Bottas (Mercedes) remains the best performer in 1’15”732, a time established last week.

If finishing at the top of a day remains necessarily satisfactory, the time is anything but the priority for Robert Kubica, who also recalls an essential point of the pre-season tests.

“You don’t really need to look at the rankings, tempers the former pilot Williams. During the trials, many evolve on different programs and focus on different things.

What's important is to focus on yourself and when you have new pieces to test, it's to give the correct feedback and make the right evaluations, and I think it's going quite well.

It's been two half days now. Last week was very good, better from my point of view than this week, but that's normal when you drive a new car for the first time with a lot more grip, a lot more downforce, everything seems easy.

Then when you want to extract more performance by getting closer to the limit, you start to struggle. We made good progress on certain pieces between these two weeks, and it's nice to see the reaction of the team.

All three of us (with Kimi Räikkönen and Antonio Giovinazzi, the starting drivers) saw the same things that we could improve and the team delivered a quick solution »

Like several drivers, the Pole also highlights the good progress of single-seaters in terms of aerodynamic downforce, which could offer even faster times this year.

“I would say doing 1’17” this year is no more difficult than doing 1’19” or 1’20” last year, Kubica explains. I have the experience of turning here but there I had to face a lot more support which allowed me to go faster, but my brain told me “until now, this was not possible”, so it took a few laps to unlock the right feeling. ".

Robert Kubica has not yet indicated when he will return to the C39, he who officiates as third driver