Ferrari blame wind tunnel for struggles

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Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso of Spain prepares for the first free practice session of the Formula One Japanese Grand Prix in the Suzuka circuit on October 5. Team boss Stefano Domenicali Friday said Ferrari would close down their wind tunnel and build a new one in a bid to fight for more titles at the front of the Formula One grid.

SUZUKA, Japan - Team boss Stefano Domenicali on Friday said that Ferrari would close down their wind tunnel and build a new one in a bid to fight for more titles at the front of the Formula One grid.

Domenicali, whose outfit has struggled for results this year — despite consistency from Fernando Alonso, who leads the drivers’ championship — blamed the team’s outdated aerodynamics facility for the poor performance of their upgraded car parts.

“I think our structure is not the best one in that respect,” Domenicali said at the Japanese Grand Prix.

“It’s quite old. We are trying to improve the quality of the tools we have, this is something we are trying to do, so we try and improve correlation and this is the plan that we should be able to do for next season.”

Domenicali added: “We are using other facilities and in the next couple of weeks we will define a programme to be more specific on that, to see what is best time to shut down and improve things that are not at the maximum level at the moment.

“I am sure it happened also to other teams, but I have seen in the second part of the season when trying to bring new updates to the car that not all the updates are working on track. So we started to investigate it more and we found this issue.

“We considered it was coming from the tool that is not really up to the speed of the new technologies in the market. That is why we think we need to improve that.

“I think the situation with the championship is clear: if you are not able to improve the car then it is more difficult to fight for the championship as we cannot rely on the problems of the others.

“We cannot rely only being third or fourth, we need to make sure we can win a race and then we see what is the situation with the others.”

Alonso was placed in fifth in Friday’s second practice session with his team-mate Felipe Massa in ninth.