The official arrival of the A522 challenger comes on the back of thousands of hours of hard work at both factories, in Enstone and Viry, and at the race track in tackling the revolutionary regulation changes in the sport.

Following 69 days without Formula 1, Fernando Alonso drove the A522 in anger for the first time as he completed 129 laps of his home track, powered by an all new RE22 power-unit. Amidst the excitement, the team still has a lot of work ahead to be as best prepared for the start of the season in Bahrain in just under a month’s time.

Esteban Ocon will take the reins of the car tomorrow for his season debut and continue the team’s winter preparations in Barcelona.

Fernando Alonso: “It’s good to be back after such a long wait. We’ve spent a long time preparing for this moment at both factories and in the garage, a lot of hours have gone into this moment. The cars are very different to last year and we need to adjust to a lot of new characteristics. We still have a lot of work to do but this is why we are at testing. We completed some good mileage and our reliability has been quite strong for the first day of testing. Mileage and reliability is more important than performance in testing, so overall we’re quite pleased with the first day in our new car.”

Matt Harman, Technical Director: “Today is the culmination of so much hard work over the last two and a half years by everyone at the team across Enstone and Viry. Congratulations to them for the immense effort in reaching this important milestone. For today, we’re very pleased with our lap count with 129 laps completed. We did have one or two issues to solve, which we were able to rectify quickly and that’s shown in our high lap count. The feedback from Fernando was good, he commented on overall balance and had good responses to different set-up ideas and tyre options. We did a lot of pre-validation work prior to arriving in Barcelona. That said, we had a few things we wanted to check and validate further, which is the aim at days like this. It’s been an impressive day for the team, a great milestone in the journey of the A522 and we’re looking forward to seeing Esteban in the car on Thursday.”