Mercedes gave Joshua D\u00fcrksen more than a brief taste of Formula 1 machinery at Portim\u00e3o. Its development driver spent two days at the wheel of the W16, working through a program that gave him his first experience of the car and the team useful running.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old completed 187 laps, covering about 544 miles at the Aut\u00f3dromo Internacional do Algarve. Mercedes says he is the first Paraguayan to drive a modern F1 car. The team did not publish lap times.<\/p>\n
This is a day, and a week, that I will remember for the rest of my life, D\u00fcrksen said. Driving a Formula One car for the first time is something every young driver dreams about, and to do that as the first Paraguayan to reach this milestone makes it even more special.<\/p>\n
D\u00fcrksen joined Mercedes’ development program earlier this year while continuing his Formula 2 career. Deputy team principal Bradley Lord said he had shown maturity and professionalism throughout the test.<\/p>\n
A first test is not a race-seat announcement, but it is a useful step for a driver who had previously known Formula 1 machinery only from outside the cockpit. His next measure remains what he does in Formula 2; Mercedes has announced no further F1 test date for him as of now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercedes gave Joshua D\u00fcrksen more than a brief taste of Formula 1 machinery at Portim\u00e3o. Its development driver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":901988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-901987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}