As a prize for the less-than-stellar season, Kimi will drive for about 9,000 km during the winter season.

According to Aldo Costa, in one month Kimi will drive more laps than the whole season.

I guess this should put an end to the endless excuse-making in case he continues to have his behind kicked by Felipe next year?

Great. He'll have a car that fits like a glove and burn-out syndrom in June.

ah dont worry
kimi will be exhausted by his extensive test schedule

The only thing Kimi needs is for his engineer to tell him there are only 10 laps left at the start of each race.

Is this really unusual?

I recall teams often mentioning numbers of over 20,000 in earlier years, though I'm unsure of how the current testing regulations have impacted winter testing mileage.

Looks like there will be no excuses next year. Ferrari wants to develop the car around Kimi, they probably think he will be the faster man for the new regulations.

I wonder if this is the precursor to Luca pushing Ferrari to make the car more Kimi-friendly.

Or to get their moneys worth from his pay cheque.

I think the car will be. Not only with the new regs but also with direction the teams takes with the car. This will especially be the case if Massa doesnt bring home the championship this year.

What's new here?

Ferrari are simply being consistent by making their number 2 driver do all the thankless donkey work testing electrical diodes and making sure threads on screws don't work loose at 200mph all winter long.

too true

it sounded more like he was giving Kimi a punishment exercise at school or something!

But yeah I like the idea of telling him there are only 10 laps left

Did Luca finally decide to demote him to test driver till the end of his contract?

From F1.com:

"As the sport’s technical demands have grown in recent years, so too has the importance of testing. With the FIA ever mindful of rising costs, teams are limited to 30,000 test kilometres during a calendar year.'

So, if I understand it correctly, Kimi doing 9,000km over the winter is almost 1/3 of what the team is allowed during the whole year.

So they are working Kimi into a test driver role?

Watch that go over well!


Cooper

I believe Winter testing is outside of the agreement.. that agreement is only for during the season

Frankly he needs it, he's always whinging he can't get the tyres to work. Well he has 9,000 KM to get the tyres to work.

That begs the question: what car and tyres will he exactly be testing with? Next year's car will be totally different!


Cooper

Thats probably his only hope.

I bet they gonna put slicks and 09 wings on the f2008 and test out endless suspensions solutions to get to the bottom of his tyreheating issues in particular and ferraris one lap deficiencies in cold weather in general.

2 years too late but better late than never. And who knows it might be an advantage to exploit all possible suspension options since it gets to be more important next year.

On the other hand, it will give a head start to the endless excuse-making in case he begins to have Massa's behind kicked next year

Does this mean they're not going to fire him after all? Woohoo! And yay!

Other than that, I don't get the excitement. So he's going to be driving the car over the winter? Amazing.

Seems like Ferrari is giving him some driving lessons, like they did with Massa back in 2003.

Yeah,i know Kimi isnt playing around with dolphins and swinging his dick to strippers ;)