Update 1: Badgers in Barcelona

An excellent flight and rapid taxi transfer to Circuit de Catalunya followed by a speedy check-in to our hotel (the Spanish Sett for the next few days) and things were going well.  We set off to find the accreditation centre and pick up our media passes, but to amazement the nice lady we’d been dealing with wasn’t around and so our short walk became somewhat longer as we negotiated the various entrances, explaining to security guards that we had to find a different lady to get our media passes.

Thankfully we eventually made it after many discussions in Spanglish and we had our passes and all systems go.  The media centre is a hive of activity and Will Buxton looked busy so we’d thought we’d interrupt him to say hello (a polite thing to do after many Twitter exchanges) – he posted this amusing tweet.

The first day became significantly better after that with a brief walk around the paddock, familiarising ourselves with where everything is.  We spent some time watching Hamilton, Vettel, Kovalainen, Alonso and Perez putting their 2012 motors through their respective testing programmes before heading down to begin our evening of interviews.

We popped in to see what Schumacher had to say about the recently launched Merecedes AMG W03 car, before having a great chat with Bruno Senna and Sergio Perez.  We’ll bring you some reports on those tomorrow.  Caterham F1 came good, with the fantastic opportunity for us have some time with Heikki Kovalainen in the team’s debriefing room.  He’s a very friendly chap, as you’d expect and we had loads of time to ask him about testing, cheese, beards and more.

After finishing with Heikki it was time to pop in to Sauber for a quick espresso (they have the best smelling food of the paddock so far) before heading back to base and go through our work for tomorrow.

We’ll have loads more from Barcelona in the morning, but for now we’ll leave you with this great picture taken by Craig, of Adam having a chat with Bruno…