Lotus will take no further part in the Barcelona test as a result of the chassis problem that occurred on Tuesday morning.
The team completed a successful four-day test at Jerez earlier this month, notching up 1788km using chassis 1, but the configuration of the Circuit de Catalunya highlighted problems in the chassis 2, forcing the team to bring Tuesday's session to a premature end.
Lotus had hoped to fly out a replacement chassis ahead of Wednesday's session but the team decided the pull out of the test with immediate effect in order to fully understand the problem.
"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," said technical director James Allison said on Tuesday night.
"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 admits the loss of four days testing is a blow to the team but he believes they were left with little choice.
"Not running this week has been a tough decision to take, but we feel that our choice is the right one," he said. "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."