Fernando Alonso was smiling as he left the “Ricardo Tormo” circuit after the debrief that ended the second day of testing for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro at this track. Indeed, a figure of 800 kilometres completed over the first two days of development for the F150 constitutes a good basis on which to build, in terms of the work over the coming weeks. It shows that things have got off on the right foot, at least in terms of reliability. As for performance, it is obviously much too early to draw any conclusions: Fernando’s 1.13.307 might have been the fastest time of the day, but that does not tell us much given that it is impossible to know what fuel loads and tyres the other drivers were using out on track, as Alonso himself pointed out. “We had three types of tyre available here and there is a significant performance difference between them, in the region of between six and seven tenths on the clock. This means it is too hard to make comparisons between the performance of the various cars.”
“I am happy with the work we did today,” said the Spaniard. “Yesterday we concentrated mainly on the systems on the car, on checking that everything was okay, while on this second day we were able to go deeper into our understanding of its behaviour, even with different fuel loads, making the first changes to the set-up. For example, we tried to deal with the oversteer and to find ways of dealing with tyre degradation over a long distance.”
A few minor hitches linked to carrying out some set-up changes on the car slowed the work programme this morning, but it did not upset the planned programme which was fully completed. “This is totally normal when you start developing a brand new car,” explained Fernando. “From the reliability point of view, this is definitely a good start. The F150 proved to be very strong and we can be happy about that. As to whether we will be competitive, we won’t really know for sure until Bahrain.”
Felipe Massa was a keen observer at the test and tomorrow, it is his turn to get behind the wheel of the F150. In the morning, his team-mate is heading off for Maranello where, the next day, he will be working on the simulator.
Source: Ferrari.com
