Even when the snow stopped in Barcelona, only five cars ventured out onto the damp and freezing circuit on Wednesday on the third day of Formula One testing.

Only one driver, the Spaniard Fernando Alonso managed to record a time.

Five centimetres of snow fell overnight on Montmelo, just north of Barcelona. With flakes still drifting down at the scheduled start time of 0900, the official website explained that the start of action on the track could not start “until visibility improves and the medical helicopter is able to fly.”

When the thermometer crept above freezing and the snow became rain the flag dropped to signal that driving could start.

By 1315, only the McLaren of Alonso had appeared.

“The car is performing well in the snow. P1 in the morning,” Alonso tweeted.

Brendon Hartley, a New Zealander driving for Toro Rosso, Pole Robert Kubica (a test driver for Williams), Swede Marcus Ericsson (Sauber) and Australian Daniel Ricciardo (Red Bull) imitated Alonso with one or two untimed laps each.

Alonso reappeared for 10 more laps recording the only, and therefore best, official time of the day, far slower than the best time recorded the day before by Sebastian Vettel (Ferrari).

Alonso then tweeted

The cold, wet track meant that the drivers could not raise tyre temperatures enough to gain a satisfactory grip. That made it impossible for teams to follow a programme that tested either performance or endurance.

“Temperatures never reached the sort of numbers required to run a Formula 1 car,” Ferrari posted on their web site.

The weather also interrupted the first two test days and rain is forecast for Thursday. Teams only have eight days of pre-season testing.

“Kimi Raikkonenn and Scuderia Ferrari took the only reasonable decision, namely to write off the day, which under the current regulations cannot be recovered later,” Ferrari said.

“Today, it felt more like being in Finland than Spain,” Raikkonen told the Ferrari site. “And everyone knows there’s no Formula 1 in my country.”

Ferrari said Vettel intended to follow his planned testing schedule on Thursday.

Mercedes tried to make light of the interruption by building a snowman, naming him Karl, creating a Twitter account in his name and then denying media reports that he had melted.

“Winter testing is always tight,” said James Allison the Mercedes technical director said in a team press release. “It is the same challenge for all the teams.”

“There’s one thing the weather does change. It gives us the opportunity fruitlessly to make plans and revise them every half an hour as the weather continues to disappoint.”