The Lotus Formula One team have announced their decision to withdraw from the remainder of the Barcelona pre-season test, after discovering an unnamed issue with the design of their new E20 chassis during the Tuesday test session.
The team completed just seven laps during the opening day of the test, announcing at lunchtime that they would not take any further part in the day's running over the issue.
The team began the Barcelona test with their second new chassis, dubbed the 'E20-02', and initially announced that they would simply fly over the E20-01 used in the Jerez test earlier this month.
But at the end of the day's running the team confirmed that they were withdrawing from the rest of the test after 'identifying an area' of their chassis design that required "additional work".
The team did not detail precisely what the issue was, though it would appear to be a fundamental problem affecting both cars.
"Before we were due to fly chassis E20-01 out to Barcelona in replacement of chassis E20-02, damaged this morning, we ran a series of simulations at the factory based on the data provided by our brief running on track today," explained the team's technical chief James Allison.
"As a result, we were able to identify an area which requires some additional work.
"It will be more productive for us to carry out these modifications to both chassis at Enstone rather than send E20-01 out to this week's test. We'll put the right measures in place and we will be able to fix the problem before next week."
Team boss Eric Boullier admitted that it had been a "tough decision" to withdraw, but insisted that the team had already found a solution to their problems.
"Not running this week has been a tough decision to take, but we feel that our choice is the right one," he muttered, "On the positive side, we have quickly identified the issue with the chassis and our design office has already devised a solution.
"We will be present at next week's test in Barcelona. We draw faith from the fact that the E20 was quick out of the box in Jerez and showed its reliability there.
"We have a lot of work ahead of us over the next week but everyone at Enstone is ready for this challenge."
Earlier, Romain Grosjean had admitted that he felt something wrong with the car right at the start of the day's running.
"We completed a few aero runs and then started timed runs, but I was very quickly aware that the car wasn’t responding as it should," Grosjean lamented.
But he added positively: "It's far better that we have an issue like this now rather than in Melbourne."
The news will be a particular blow to returning F1 champion Kimi Raikkonen, who now faces just two more days in the car to get up to speed at the final test next week.
The Finn had been scheduled to drive the car on Thursday and Friday this week.
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