The chances of teams failing in their design this season is massive, says Pat Fry

Pat Fry

According to Ferrari engineering director Pat Fry, the chances of Formula One teams getting their car designs wrong this year are very high due to the change of rules.

The teams are just three weeks away from the first pre-season test in Jerez and Fry believes that the area of cooling will be the trickiest aspect for the design.

“I think it is one of those years where you need to be developing your car rather than fixing cooling problems. At the start of each year when you get the cooling wrong, a huge amount of resource goes into fixing radiators, bodywork and everything like that. I am sure we have done it here [at Ferrari] in the past and we’ve done it at my former team [McLaren] in the past, where you waste the first couple of months,” he said.

“With the 2014 changes it is going to be even more dramatic – and the opportunities for getting it wrong are going to be massive. Hopefully we have got our sums right, but there will be a lot of people scratching their heads in January,” he added.

Fry also said that the teams will be lining up with entirely different looking cars this time due to the various needs.

“Cooling is always going to be a challenge with the level of cooling that next year’s car needs, and trying to integrate physically that much stuff into the car in a neat package is quite challenging. I think it will be interesting and there will be some dramatic differences in cars for once. Some people will be pretty busy I think,” he said.