Hamilton signs off in style

Lewis Hamilton wrapped up his pre-season testing with Mercedes in eye-catching style on Saturday with a lap that was easily the fastest seen so far this year in Barcelona.

The 2008 Formula One world champion, who will make his Mercedes race debut in Melbourne on March 17, lapped a dry Circuit de Catalunya in 1:20.558 seconds to top the penultimate day's timesheets.
Germany's Nico Rosberg will complete testing for the team on Sunday.

Although too much should not be read into what happens at the test track, Hamilton's lap was more than a second quicker than his fastest time in qualifying for last year's race there (1:21.707). It was also well inside Kimi Raikkonen's 2008 race lap record of 1:21.670.

Hamilton's 117 laps on Saturday, equal to 545km, took the Briton's pre-season total distance covered in the new F1 W04 car to 2,585km with Hamilton setting the fastest time on two of the 13 days so far.

"We were able to get through all the test items that we wanted to achieve by the end of my programme. There's still a lot of work ahead of us to get to where we want to be but the team is doing a great job," he told reporters.

"The reliability, the mileage and the step-by-step improvements that we have achieved during the three tests are all very encouraging.  Whilst we've been focusing on our own performance, we definitely haven't seen the full potential of our competitors yet, so it's difficult to predict where we might be," added Hamilton.