Audi chaos continues with another major issue as red flag stops F1 testing session

Audi have suffered their second technical failure in as many days of running during the first F1 pre-season test. The new German squad saw their first outing on Monday cut short due to a technical issue, and triggered an early red flag during Wednesday's morning session at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

The new Audi works team, formed from the shell of Sauber's F1 operation after their long-awaited takeover was completed during the off-season, completed just 27 laps of running on the opening day of this behind-the-scenes pre-season test. Gabriel Bortoleto was behind the wheel, but the team spotted a technical issue and forced the Brazilian racer to stop on track.

The next issue reared its head on Wednesday when Nico Hulkenberg was forced to stop his R26 machine on track between Turn Nine and Turn 10. According to The Race, the stoppage was caused by a hydraulic fault. The veteran racer's technical failure triggered the red flag, which stopped track action for the next 21 minutes.

Despite only putting the R26 through limited track running, Bortoleto was content with the work done by his team on the opening test day in Montmelo. “It was, I would say, a bit of a short day,” he said after climbing out of the car. “We were doing a pretty decent job in the morning, putting some laps on board, testing some things. We were going in the right direction.

“But as we all expected, it is a shakedown – everything can happen, and we expect to find issues here and there in the car. We found a couple of problems that unfortunately put us out of the day from the morning, so I didn’t run much today. But it was expected, these types of things – we are finding everything now to hopefully not find it in the next test or in the first race of the year.

“But overall, I would say when we were running positive, [it was] good to have a feel with the new car, the new regulations, power unit and everything. Hopefully on the next day I’m driving I can get a few more laps onboard.”

When quizzed over the issue suffered by Bortoleto, team principal Jonathan Wheatley downplayed the severity of the problem, and the fallout of clocking just 27 laps when several teams pushed well into the 100s. "We had a technical issue with the car – we spotted it, decided to switch the car off on track," he explained.

“We’ve got plenty of testing this year, and we wanted to really understand the problems, and we’ve been carefully analysing that. We’re just getting the car prepped and ready, and we’ll see what the weather conditions are for tomorrow to see whether tomorrow’s a day we’ll run.”