Motorsport - All Comments

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

Peter Cavellini — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:41:52 GMT

Whatcha all arguing about?, the season proper hasn't even started yet and you've all got the season run and done,yes, the car's look odd, but who said they had to be pretty?,functional, that's all aero has to be, nothing else, best driver wins?...not nowadays, controversial?,you tell me.

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

JamPal — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:02:11 GMT

Whether it be quantum physics or building bridges, the best engineered solutions have an inate elegance that this car clearly lacks.

Designed by committee, it won't work, it's too ugly to have been thought through clearly. It's either been over engineered or badly thought out.

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

RadeB — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:24:10 GMT

jamesf1@

Are you drunk?

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

jamesf1 — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:11:53 GMT

Simulation? Don't know, teams seem to keep this very secret.

- Pat Fry does and has admitted as such He is Ferrari' s technical director by the way. Recently moved from Mclaren so can judge Ferrari's capabilities. The relied on extensive testing under the old rules and as such got behind in this area, which now hurts them with much restricted track testing.

Massa? Not as quick as he used to be, but hard to tell as he never gets the same specification of car or access to the pits. No. 1 driver has all the newest and priority to the pits. Plus, he's being used to block other drivers keeping them away from the team's main focus.

- Drivel. He slower cos hes slower. A lot slower. Unfortunatley was never tha same after the fearsome accident he suffered in 2009. Its a cliche but seems to be true. He just isnt.

Alonso? I'm forgetting about the two world Championships he's brought Ferrari, aren't I?

- Alonso put it on multiple podiums, led and won. Massa never bettered fifth. Yes Alonso is wringing the the neck of a poor car and getting absolutley everything out of it. So yeas Id sa he is the main element of Ferrari which has deliverd last couple of years.

Do you even watch F1?

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

Symanski — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:52:40 GMT

@Jamesf1:

Simulation? Don't know, teams seem to keep this very secret.

Alonso? I'm forgetting about the two world Championships he's brought Ferrari, aren't I?

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

jamesf1 — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:04:33 GMT

reactive ride height suspension is banned.

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

jamesf1 — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:00:39 GMT

It comes dow to 2 reasons.

Behind the curve on simulation

Massa not worthy of a drive in a top team.

Spent too much on Alonso? He is the only part of Ferrari delivering..

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

RadeB — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:21:51 GMT

VirginPower@ "...Beyond the removal of the blown-diffuser, the worst thing that the FIA has done this year is to ban reactive ride-height, which was an interesting device that added another dimension with which the masterminds could play"

Are you sure about this?

As I understood, reactive ride-high suspension is not banned.

It's designed to help the car maintain a constant ride height under braking, which should boost stability and hence aerodynamic performance. An obstacle could have been any need for direct input from the driver - excluding DRS, any driver influence on a car's aerodynamics breaches the regulations - but this is entirely mechanical and is activated by the brakes' torque, not the driver. It's reactive, not active.

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

March1 — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:41:50 GMT

There is nothing wrong at all with either the Ferrari or the McLaren.

It is simply that the brilliance of Adrian Newey's design team, Red Bull's huge budget (cap not withstanding) and Vettel's very decent driving skills are a combination too far for the others to match at present.

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

petrolheadinrussia — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:08:10 GMT

LP in Brighton hit it best !! agreed old fruit..

PLUS management can be so annying as to slow things down in the hurry to prove its better!

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

Peter Cavellini — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:22:08 GMT

FR3000,@

If your going to say something make it..........?

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

FR3000 — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 19:27:35 GMT

Possible reasons for poor peformance:

1. They're rubbish

2. Insufficient cheating

3. FIA not giving enough assistance

4. Divers not understanding team order coded messages

5. Space Bats

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

Peter Cavellini — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:42:01 GMT

First few races will tell all, or is that too obvious?

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

VirginPower — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:16:53 GMT

The beauty of an F1 car is something you appreciate as an afterthought, never as a leading concern, so, to moan about a solution before its proved slow is worse than irrelevant. This type of talk might encourage even more superficial coverage on telly where they already say, "Let's call a paddock a Morrisons so women understand." And that actually happened on BBC1, so you shut your gob.

What appears to be a chink in this regulation is that it stipulates a 7.5cm drop in the nose height from the top surface, so the solutions range from McLaren making very little change to its front-end design ethos (it already had a low nose), through noses of similar length but skateboard thinness, to Ferrari bringing the leading edge of the nose inwards of the front of the wing in order to maintain a similar air-space beneath the nose.

The wedge that starts at the end of the driver cell may induce a positive aerodynamic effect that, in Ferrari's case, results in extra flow under the nose, and the MP4-27 appears to funnel air from either side of the nose towards the tea-tray in the centre-section. Hooked winglets that constrain splay of the air are peculiar to McLaren's front wing.

The intended result of the new regulation is to prevent Webber flying about upside-down anymore and stop cars' noses mounting the sidepods, and it will have a marginal effect in the most observant designs, but, if the bottom surface of the nose is not the plane that is effected significantly, nothing much has changed, and there's surely now a greater chance of cars that are hit from behind or the side mounting the nose of the colliding car and bonking the driver on the head. The consequential danger of airflow being allowed under the nose still seems to exist.

Beyond the removal of the blown-diffuser, the worst thing that the FIA has done this year is to ban reactive ride-height, which was an interesting device that added another dimension with which the masterminds could play.

There seems to be less and less meat to feed the minds of geniuses like Newey, and, in F1, exotic and cutting-edge technology is primary and a stampede of the best drivers in the world is what naturally follows. If we allow Formula One to become a GP2-II for all the winners of GP2-I, we might as well just have GP2 and pension-off Allison, Bell, Fry and Newey as a massive cost saving. Better still, let The Race Of Champions become the ultimate proving ground.

For obvious reasons, it's difficult to argue that a device that stiffens the suspension during braking has its greatest effect on handling, but I'd argue that this is progressive and innovative enough to be considered on its own merits. Mass dampers would've had no useful effect on the road, for instance, but, Lotus's proposed passive ride-height mechanism could produce a transferable benefit (as if that really matters).

re: What’s wrong with Ferrari’s F1 team nowadays?

jerry99 — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:41:01 GMT

I believe that the only problem Ferrari have is in adapting to the recent rule changes.

In the past Ferrari spent an awful lot of money perfecting their cars with track testing and even bespoke tyres. This has now been stopped by the FIA and the result is that teams who can design a car without much testing or detailed tyre devlopment are winning the trophies.

If Ferrari cannot adjust to this I think they could quit F1 and participate in other types of motorsport that do not restrict development in this way. After all if Ferrari applied the same development process to its road cars as they are now obliged to in F1 its cars would be ridiculed by the likes of Autocar (as they once were).