Ferrari has explained how the decision to accelerate its latest Formula 1 upgrade package to the Spanish Grand Prix was not a reaction to its poor showing in Canada.
The Italian marque’s promising opening to the campaign was curtailed at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve as both drivers failed to make Q3 and also retired from the race.
Ferrari’s solution has been to fast-track the developments that were scheduled to arrive at Silverstone in Barcelona this weekend, comprising seven new components.
However, Ferrari Senior Performance Engineer Jock Clear has denied the updates are a response to the team’s troubles in Montreal and instead are pre-planned parts.
“I think we’ve spoken in the past about how subtle some of the effects on aero are, certainly at the back of the car,” Clear said.
“And this was in parallel with Imola, so this isn’t a reaction to Imola, if you see what I mean. This isn’t the upgrade from Imola, and then we look at what it did.
“This was always a scheduled upgrade that’s in parallel. So, the fact that we’re bringing it here, as I said just now, to the TV, as long as it performs as we expect, and in the recent past we’ve had very good correlations, so we have no reason to believe it won’t.
So, as long as it performs as we expect today, again, that’s good confirmation that we understand what’s going on this car.
“We didn’t have to wait, and I think I mentioned this the last time we spoke, we don’t have to wait for the Imola package and say, OK, what does that do?
“Now we go in this direction. We knew what the Imola package would do, and it did what it should do.
“In parallel, we were also looking at the next step beyond that, and that’s what you see here.”
When bringing several parts on a race weekend teams will tend to run back-to-back comparison tests with one driver using the old-spec and the other utilising the new.
But Ferrari elected to not conduct such a practice during first practice, with Clear stating that there would not be enough practice time to gather a definitive conclusion.
Clear has revealed that Ferrari opted not to run a back-to-back comparison test as there is not enough practice time to gather conclusive evidence between the parts.
“So, we think we are much better off, and we know we are much better off in the last year, in terms of tyre management, getting energy in the tyres, taking energy out of the tyres, looking after tyre deg, and therefore we have some confidence in the way we are going.
“If we put this package on here, we are not going to be able to evaluate that here. We are not going to be able to say to, ‘OK, Charles is running the old floor today, Carlos is running the new floor in the morning, you can clearly see the difference in tyre’. We are not going to be able to do that, because the differences are too subtle.
“You haven’t got enough laps, you haven’t got absolutely the same conditions, because one driver will be driving slightly differently.
“So, we are not going to be able to evaluate that, but we will look for any warning signs that say, ‘oh, actually, this is not giving you what you thought you would’.
“As long as we don’t see anything out of the ordinary, we will assume for now that we are still carrying on in that right direction.
“And this is the, I suppose, the crux of how people’s development shifts, is those, what we would call, really low-frequency indicators are really difficult to see from one race to another.
“So, it’s going to be three, four races, and then you think, actually, we are starting to look pretty poor on tyre deg, maybe we have gone the wrong way.”
Clear explained how Barcelona’s status as a conventional track and the abundance of knowledge the teams have from the circuit serves to mitigate those elements.
“Barcelona is a fantastic circuit to evaluate a car,” he acknowledged. “So, if you can, you’re always going to want to come to Barcelona with a package.
“That’s why we do pre-season here, and as a result, we’ve got so much experience here that it levels all of the other variables for us, and you get a good read on a package.
“So, it’s always a good place to come.
“I think, honestly, because the Imola package was a good step, I think maybe this was scheduled for later, because this triple header offers you three good opportunities.
“Austria and Silverstone are also very good. But, yeah, we did push it forward a bit.
“Just because it’s super close at the moment, and if you can come one race earlier, actually the gains are double, effectively, because it’s always a race, isn’t it?
“So, it’s not just what our upgrade is doing, it’s what other people are doing, and if we can just get an upgrade one step earlier than the others, then you carry that forward a bit.”
Asked how much the upgrade is set to be worth, he said: “When we quantify an upgrade, we’re only talking performance. That’s what it’s all about at the end of the day.
“We could talk some interesting numbers that the aero department produce, but how much lap time it produces is always our measure.”
