After giving Mercedes AMG Petronas a 1-2 finish last Sunday at Red Bull Austrian Grand Prix,  Mercedes Nico Rosberg is back in Spielberg during the two days post-race test, posting the fastest time in two-day F1 group test to maintain the top spot on Wednesday.

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Mercedes AMG Petronas German driver completed 117 laps on the W06, returning to the cockpit 24 hours later than scheduled. He was fortunate to have a much better racing conditions compared to the Force India development driver Pascal Wehrlein, who served as a substitute driver for Rosberg in day one when the conditions are unstable.

Rosberg started the second day of the final in-season test a little bit slow as he worked through an aero programme and spent his final hour into the pits with his car stopped in the pit-lane access roads before the lunch break with a gearbox failure.

"We had a gearbox issue just before lunch but luckily it didn't really cost us any time as we could work on it during the break and the guys did a great job to get me back out there so quick, so thank you to them for that," Rosberg told reporters via Sky Sports.

With his crew successfully fixing the issue before the start of the second half of the test, Rosberg added 83 more laps to the 34 laps he had in the morning session. They worked on aero and set up evaluations and tested the unmarked Pirelli rubber for a large part of the afternoon.

Rosberg did not disappoint his crew, posting a time of 1 min10s before taking advantage of an empty circuit to set a 1 min 09.419s lap. He continued to improve his pace, clocking a time of 1min 09.113s - which was the fastest time of the two days post-race test.

Rosberg closest rival in this post-race test proved to be Scuderia Ferrari reserve driver Esteban Gutierrez, who pushed Ferrari to P2 late in the day. The Mexican spent a lot of the day at the bottom of the timesheets, but he managed to work his way through the Scuderia's programme, dramatically improving his time in the final couple of hours to register a time of 1 min 09.931s. Williams Valterri Bottas finished with the third fastest time at 1:10.029 79.

TagsAMG Petronas German, Nico Rosberg, Pascal Wehlein, Formula One Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton