McLaren’s Paddy Lowe expects Ferrari to challenge for victory in Valencia as a result of their new rear-end.
The Italian outfit will debut the update at this weekends GP where it is expected to provide almost half a second pace advantage. That would put the team on par or even slightly ahead of Red Bull and McLaren.
That is something which concerns Lowe, however he is interested to see how Ferrari get on with the improvements, as McLaren will be introducing their own update in Silverstone which also features the new exhaust layout.
“That is a concern, but we will have to see how they get on with it,” Lowe said in a McLaren-Mercedes phone-in.
“I think it is common knowledge that all the rest of the teams are playing catch-up [to Red Bull] in that area. So that’s something we’re aiming to bring to the British Grand Prix, to try and make it work from the outset.
“There are some technical challenges with it, for example blasting your bodywork directly with exhaust flow can generate some reasonably high temperatures. It’s certainly not without its challenges to try to hit the ground running with a system like that when we don’t have any proper track testing to do. We’ll be doing trials at an aerodynamics day [a straight-line test] before Silverstone and then we will have it working in the practice sessions and race it on the Sunday.”
