First indications are that everything is positive so we have no particular concerns over the aero package introduced in Spa. We did find, after the race in Spa, a reasonable amount of damage to some of the aero components of the car. We re-tested those components in Vairano and confirmed that there was some performance loss due to the damaged components. So we have a little bit of work to do to make those parts of the car a little bit more robust so we don’t suffer from that problem in the future.
Monza should be a reasonable circuit for us. We know one of the strengths of the car compared to the competition is its braking performance. And as everyone knows Monza is a very critical track for braking performance. So that’s definitely one of the strong points of our car. In slow-speed chicanes the car’s been reasonably good this year and the couple of medium-speed corners in Monza should suit us reasonably well so we’re expecting a reasonable result at Monza. We’re expecting to be competitive. Having said that there’s always a surprise at Monza because it’s a unique aerodynamic package. We use a level of downforce in Monza that we don’t use anywhere else. All the teams are developing a specific aero package that’s only used at Monza. So there’s always the chance that somebody might come up with a bit of a surprise in Monza because they’ve done a particularly good or bad job of their low-downforce aero package.
Chris Dyer
For engine people Monza is still the most challenging race. I would say Monza and Spa are the two races where the engine performance plays a big role. So, even though the possibility of modifying the engine is limited by the regulations, it’s still very important to have reliability and maximum performance because there we can make the biggest contribution to our team. Unfortunately we started the season with some reliability problems. You know that we can use eight engines through the season so we plan our development and our reliability improvement to be sure we don’t use a ninth engine. We think we have done a good job on this but we can judge how good our job was at the end of the season. So for Ferrari and our customer teams we are trying our best to avoid using a ninth engine. The usage of the engine at this moment of the year is part of the strategy of the team this means that we are not obliged to use an engine until the end. We could use a fresh engine in Spa and maybe we can use a fresh engine in Monza. The most important thing is we extend the life of the engines until the end of the season.
I think the team has done an impressive development programme during the season. We have seen five steps. And of course no-one of us was happy with the result in Spa. The result in Spa was much below our expectations. We think the car was better than the performance showed in Spa. So, apart from the fact that Monza is an important race for us because it’s the Italian Grand Prix, it’s very important also for us to prove that what we introduced on the car was a step forward and we are confident that the performance we show there will be better than what we showed in Spa.
Luca Marmorini
http://www.f1fanatic...lems-are-fixed/
Damaged components? I guess that means EBD overheated some parts like in Mercedes, but hopefully they solved problem and everything should be OK at Monza .
But what Luca is saying is just mad. Using 8th engine in Italy would mean that both Fernando's and Felipe's units have to last 5 Saturdays and Sundays, which is insanity. Last year Kimi had the same engine at Spa and Monza and scored win and 3rd place, so I hope they won't be fools to make any silly moves .