Williams chief technical officer Paddy Lowe avoided questions about Robert Kubica’s pace during testing in Abu Dhabi, saying it is “a complicated topic”.

Kubica completed 100 laps during the Pirelli tire test on Tuesday before a late burst of 28 laps on Wednesday allowed the Pole to set his fastest time during a short run on hypersoft tires. Despite that program, Lowe says it would not be fair to publicly read into the times over the past two days while evaluating Kubica for a potential race seat.

“I’m not going to talk about speed,” Lowe said. “It’s a complicated topic. I’m sure you want me to give some answers about that, but it’s not something we are not going to discuss. The objective was to test the tires and learn about the car.

“It’s a really complicated topic, performance and speed, so to read a timesheet is quite misleading. So I’m not going to talk about that. We haven’t even analyzed it for ourselves.”

However, Lowe insisted he was happy with Kubica’s performance from a tire testing point of view across the two days at the Yas Marina Circuit, where he shared the 2017 car with race driver Lance Stroll and Russian youngster Sergey Sirotkin.

“Robert did a great job,” he said. “As you know, we had three drivers for the two days. Robert had a whole day out of the testing, driving the first day and the second day. The test was focused on 2018 tires so we got some very good results from all three directions in terms of drivers on the tires. Also some feedback on the car itself from Sergey and Robert, who had driven other cars.

“Robert drove the 2014 car at Silverstone and Hungary, so lots of good information and Robert did a fantastic job. He’s a very, very professional guy, very knowledgeable, very experienced, and that was a great benefit during these evaluations.

“We wanted to see Robert as he hasn’t driven a current car, or current tires, so of course it was interesting to see how he got on with that. No problems. He’s absolutely fine. Good driving, no complaints, no issues. All went well.”