Ferrari has taken a much more aggressive and risky approach to their 2012 challenger as a result of a disappointing season in which they’ve won just a single race.
Ferrari’s chief designer, Nikolas Tombazis, is confident that the new approach will enable the outfit to challenge the likes of Red Bull and McLaren from the very first race.
“I hope the results will speak for themselves when we launch the car and more importantly, as we tackle the first few races on the calendar,” he told the Ferrari website.
Tombazis conceded that the outfit had been too conservative over the previous few seasons when designing their cars.
“A more aggressive approach has come about as the result of the analysis we carried out of the defeats we suffered over the past few years.
“We realised we had been a bit too conservative and had closed our minds to some strands of development. So for next year’s car, we have sanctioned a much more aggressive approach on the aero front, which has required a much closer working relationship with those developing the structure of the car.”
When asked to describe how the new car might look, the Italian was rather coy, but said team principal Stefano Domenicali described it as having the ‘wow factor’.
“I think that visually, the new car is fairly different to its predecessor but if it has a wow factor, as our team principal Stefano Domenicali thought, when he first saw the model, then I hope the wow factor will also be evident from the results. We have set ourselves ambitious targets, which we intend to maintain and so, on this front, I am quite optimistic.”
