Ferrari breaches curfew twice in Abu Dhabi
For the second consecutive night, Scuderia Ferrari has violated the FIA-imposed technical curfew to perfect the F2012 before the qualifying and the race. However, the teams have four exceptions during the season, and therefore, the team from Maranello will not be penalized.
Friday night, Scuderia Ferrari was not satisfied with the performance of the F2012 on the Yas Marina circuit, at least in the context of the fast lap exercise. The team from Maranello had indeed brought numerous innovations, and Massimo Rivola, the sporting director of the Italian team, considered Friday night that there was a long night ahead for the engineers to properly set up the car.
Thus, Ferrari violated, for the second consecutive night, the technical curfew imposed by the FIA. Article 30.19 of the sporting regulations indeed stipulates that « no team member, associated in any way with the operations conducted on the car, is allowed within the circuit limits » during predefined periods. The regulation provides for a first curfew period of six hours starting nine hours before the beginning of Free Practice 1. Except for Monaco, where the practice sessions take place on Thursday instead of Friday, a second curfew period starts ten and a half hours after the scheduled end of Free Practice 2 and ends three hours before the start of Free Practice 3. However, during the season, teams are allowed to break this curfew up to four times, and this does not concern non-operational team members (executives, communications manager, hospitality staff, etc.).
In Abu Dhabi, Scuderia Ferrari broke the curfew twice, first on the night from Thursday to Friday, then last night: « This morning, team personnel associated with car operations were within the circuit limits during the six-hour curfew period [editor’s note], » the FIA stated in a communiqué. « This was the second of the four individual exceptions allowed for Ferrari during the 2012 Formula 1 championship, and therefore no action should be taken. »
By breaking the curfew, Ferrari mainly hopes to provide its drivers with a more competitive single-seater for the rest of the weekend: “Not everything was good because when you start making some changes to the car and test something new, you need to spend more time on aerodynamic testing rather than on tuning per se. So we are confident of closing the gap on Saturday and I am very confident for the race,” stated Rivola on Friday evening.
Note, however, that BBC Sport reports that this second curfew was broken by a single member of the team who mistakenly arrived early at the circuit, without having worked on the car. An error which, if confirmed, deprives the Scuderia of a valuable joker.
