Alpine carried out two days of private testing earlier this week at Silverstone, with Academy drivers Oscar Piastri and Guanyu Zhou sharing driving duties. Piastri took the wheel of the Renault R.S.18 on Tuesday, and spend the day acclimatising to Formula 1 machinery on the back of his two podiums in Monaco last weekend in Formula 2. He did 86 laps in total, adding to his experience driving the R.S.18 last November in Bahrain. Guanyu Zhou, no stranger to carrying out such private tests with Renault, took over for Wednesday, and did 106 laps over the day. “It’s been a good two days of testing for our Academy drivers at Silverstone," said Mia Sharizman, Alpine Academy Director. "It’s the first time we’ve tested at Silverstone with the R.S.18 car and it’s obviously the first time the Academy drivers have done an F1 test this year. Our programme ran smoothly, despite some of the bad weather for Oscar. He did approximately 500km and completed a full F1 race distance, which is good considering it’s his second time in an F1 car. "Our aim for him was to get up to speed with the car and continue his development. For Zhou, it’s good to see his continued maturity and he has come on leaps and bounds of late, in what is his third year in the test programme. "It reflects in his R.S.18 programme today, where he completed 106 laps, the most mileage he has done with an F1 car in a single day. Both drivers will take some great learnings from the two days and we’ll continue to look at future test opportunities for all our Academy drivers.”
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