Spanish Grand Prix: Ferrari team preview

Felipe Massa will be hoping for a good weekend.

Fernando Alonso is back home and he loves Barcelona, making it one of Ferrari‘s strongest races. Felipe Massa has had good experiences here, and will be hoping that it continues this weekend.

Ferrari, like other teams, haven’t planned too many upgrades but insist that they can mount a race-winning challenge with what they have. Alonso topped the first practice and came second in the next one. He’ll be hoping that the conditions favour him.

Ferrari’s Chief Designer, Nikolas Tombazis, spoke of Ferrari’s demands in Spain, “I think in general, the first results mean we can be reasonably optimistic about the rest of the season, with a sense that we can fight for wins and the championship,” reckons Tombazis. “However, if I was to score our overall performance, I would only give it a 6 out of 10 and that’s for two main reasons: one is that we are not yet quite where we want to be. In the first four Grands Prix, we were not really able to fight for pole position and that is one of our main objectives at the moment. Secondly, if you look at the actual results, even if it’s true we’ve had a win, which naturally we can be very pleased about, we have also had two very bad results where we scored very few points. However, I reiterate, that overall, we can be optimistic for the future.

“We have made a series of changes to our approach in terms of our working practices and also from an organisational point of view. At the same time, we are improving our facilities and I believe we now also have a better understanding about how certain aspects of the car work. Putting all that together has enabled us to make a better start to the season than in previous years.

“However, the process is not complete and we feel we are only halfway through these fundamental changes and we continue to work on improving all these parameters, which, in the case of our facilities, includes the work we are doing on our wind tunnel. I think the new working methods we have adopted and the new structure put in place has allowed us to be more creative and this was one of the objectives we established along with Pat Fry, to reorganise the place and to give people more time to think. We identified areas where, in the past few years, we were a bit understaffed, which meant people were under pressure and did not have time to think about what could make the car go faster. It is working, but there is room to improve still further, even though this aspect has definitely contributed to the improvement in performance that we have seen so far this year.”