Mark Webber showed Red Bull’s pace as Formula One’s final pre-season test started in Barcelona on Tuesday, but McLaren also picked up speed after teething problems last month.
Webber, who could become the first Australian to win his home race when the season starts in Melbourne on March 27, lapped a cold Circuit de Catalunya with a best time of one minute 22.544 seconds.
The time was set in the morning, on a qualifying-style single lap, before the team switched to longer stints in the afternoon.
“It was a pretty good day and not much has changed since last week,” Webber said after completing 97 laps. “We got some good laps in today.”
World champion Sebastian Vettel was to be in the Red Bull yesterday.
McLaren’s Jenson Button was second on the timesheets, 0.366 slower.
“The last couple of tests haven’t been perfect for us, and I think that’s partly due to us lacking set-up work,” said the 2009 champion, who did 74 laps. “But today I think we made some positive progress with MP4-26’s balance.
“I know there’s not much testing left, I only have one more day in the car, but after today I feel we can make further positive progress over the next few days,” he said.
Button lapped with a bulbous “porpoise” nose to the McLaren, but the team said the eye-catching feature was purely for measuring purposes and would not be raced.
Russian Vitaly Petrov was third-fastest for Lotus-backed Renault after taking over from German teammate Nick Heidfeld, who was suffering from a cold.
Heidfeld suspected champions Red Bull, who also have a Renault engine, still had plenty in reserve despite their obvious pace and was unhappy about his own team’s lack of reliability.
“I think they [Red Bull] are still not showing everything,” he told autosport.com.
“If you look at the sector times, they still have something in their pocket. So from the sector times at least, there might be even more that they are not showing,” Heidfeld said. “I still think that they are leading the pack at the moment. By how much? That is the question.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier