It was the Frenchman’s first proper taste at the wheel of the A522 and he continued yesterday’s strong work from Fernando Alonso by accumulating 125 laps in total and ticking off large parts of the team’s day two programme.

The team has so far completed 254 laps around the 4.655km circuit, edging over 1,000km for the week to date, equivalent from driving from the Barcelona circuit to the team’s engine base in Viry-Chatillon, Paris.

BWT Alpine F1 Team’s strong mileage over the last two days so far leaves an optimistic feeling about reliability, albeit with the usual hiccups that testing Formula 1 cars tends to provide. Tomorrow, Fernando takes over the duties for the morning while, Esteban caps off the week in the afternoon.

Esteban Ocon: “Today was my first proper day in the A522 and it’s certainly a great feeling to be back in a Formula 1 car and doing lots of laps. It was good to start to get a feeling for the car on proper tyres in accurate testing conditions. The most important target for us today, like yesterday too, was to do lots of running so to do over 100 laps is encouraging. We tested a lot of different things and we’ve given ourselves a couple of ideas to work on. We definitely have a direction on the particular areas to improve, which is the main objective at pre-season testing. It’s a positive start and I’m looking forward to discovering more at tomorrow’s test.”

Alan Permane, BWT Alpine F1 Team Sporting Director: “It was another solid day here where we spent the morning doing some set up work and understanding more about the car, learning of course on every run. In the afternoon, we ran a race simulation which went well. The car ran reliably, and we had one small stoppage for a bracket on the floor of the car that had broken which we had to replace. Aside from that the new power unit and the chassis ran faultlessly. Tomorrow’s afternoon session will be wet as it will be a Pirelli wet session. Fernando will jump back in tomorrow to continue his work from the first day with Esteban driving the car in wet conditions in the afternoon.”