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Rosberg Pleased with Mercedes Direction

This year's Mercedes W02 has finally made Nico Rosberg happy and confident in a great 2011 campaign, as the German driver took his car on top of the timing reports on Sunday, in the 3rd day of testing on Barcelona's Circuit de Catalunya.

Just as predicted by Rosberg, Mercedes is slowly beginning to close the gap on the championship big guns, and things suddenly look good again for the Brackley based team. After criticizing the initial 2011 package following the Jerez test a couple of weekends ago, Rosberg now said his team is moving into the right direction.

For sure we still have some problems, but it's going in the right direction,” said Rosberg after the Saturday running. “Today we learned a lot and made some progress, so things are improving.

It was expected that we would be struggling in the winter because the car is built mainly to test reliability and it's not there for performance. The performance is going to come in the next few weeks and then we have to wait and see where we are,” he added.

Last week, he told the media that Mercedes will bring some huge aerodynamic changes to the car prior to the season opening Bahrain Grand Prix, aimed at improving its performance. His comments were made after Mercedes GP experienced some reliability issues with the W02 in Valencia and Jerez.

In addition to his fast time in Barcelona on Sunday, Rosberg also got the chance to test Pirelli's intermediate tires – as did everyone else – and admitted it provided his team with a good understanding of their behavior.

It was interesting running with the intermediates this morning and, although the warm-up is tricky, we definitely improved our understanding of the tires. (...) We made good progress in understanding the car and the tires, and the reliability was solid once again.
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