A Ferrari renaissance was expected in 2016, but a woeful car with huge downforce deficiency relative to the pace setters has resulted in the Italian team to use the current SF16-H as a test bed for their 2017 Formula 1 project.
Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene told F1i, “If you start to focus your attention on solving this year’s problems, you are losing time for next year’s development. This is the reason why we have been very much concentrated on [our] high-performance circuits like Suzuka because they can give us data for next year’s car.”
Speaking to media after the United States Grand Prix, Ferrari driver Sebastian Vettel attributed the ill handling he had mid-race to a piece of rubber wedged onto the rear wing of his car.
“It is quite surprising if you lose downforce very suddenly,” explained Vettel. “It’s not like someone is knocking one or two seconds before, and tells you you’re about to lose the car, so I was quite lucky in that instance to be able to save it.”
“It was quite a big snap. We were travelling at quite high speeds but I was able to save the car. I had a couple of moments in the race and after that, I slowed down a bit to take it easy as we didn’t have anywhere to go. We were 10 seconds behind Daniel [Ricciardo] and there was nothing going on behind,” added Vettel.
Despite the problem it was clear that Ferrari were over a second down on the pace of Mercedes and about half a second adrift of Red Bull in qualifying and race trim.
When asked about the gap, Arrivabene replied, “I don’t want to repeat all season where we have some issues. It’s clear now that circuits with high downforce do not suit us.”
“Austin is a high-downforce track and it’s not comparable to Suzuka where we made some steps and were happy about this. But the characteristics of COTA are completely different,” added the Ferrari team chief.
Read the full story at GRAND PRIX 247
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