Saturday Report: Ferrari – Mystified by its lack of speed

Ferrari admitted that the team was fighting to get answers on why the new car is not proving to be competitive against the Red Bulls and McLarens.

Having failed to get close to the Red Bulls and McLarens in Sepang, the team is now convinced that they are simply not fast enough and need to embark on a significant development program to get back in the race.

Technical director Aldo Costa revealed on Saturday that the Scuderia was still perplexed about why all the aerodynamic improvements introduced during the winter tests in Barcelona did not work – and that this could lead to testing in China – to get to the bottom of the issue.

«If it were easy, we would have already done it. We still don’t know where the problems are coming from. We are working on it, but it’s a complex assessment that we are conducting in multiple environments, not just here on the track.»

Costa believes that if the team finds the answer to understand its problems, then it could help them make a big step forward – with more improvements to come.

«If we are able to discover what went wrong in our initial development phase, it would solve a good part of our performance deficit. Then, we will need to be very aggressive in development, that’s for sure. We need to ask ourselves how we can try to do it and of course, we will have to change our approach.»

These people (Red Bull and McLaren) have set the bar very high, so we have to respond, and I am sure that in Maranello, we have very talented people. I am certain they will react, and I believe in them, I believe in the team, so we will do it.

Costa also said that Ferrari had an improvement program in place: «The program is to recover, to catch up. We are working on several things, several views. We have a good development for China, very good ones for Turkey, and there are some interesting improvements coming for mid-season. We have our program. Is it enough? I don’t know. We need to go back home and push even more. We must develop faster than the others, we need to adopt a week-by-week pace to invent new things, new systems. »

These two teams did a better job than us, so we have to learn from them and then make the necessary changes in our approach. The most important thing is that the car is fast.

Unfortunately, when you start working on Friday at a constant speed, you don’t focus enough on setup. You have to pay penalties for being too late in setting up for the race, which I think is what we did.

« We lost time doing aerodynamic tests, and we didn’t work on the tires and settings at all. We’re paying for it now. Last night and this morning, I think we caught up, and we arrived at the qualifications with a reasonable balance. In terms of race pace and tire wear, I think we’ve made interesting progress this weekend, so let’s wait and see tomorrow. I don’t think we’ll go as fast as the top four, but we’ll do our best »