|
The third
round of the Formula 1 World Championship takes place at
the Sakhir Circuit in Bahrain this weekend, a very
familiar venue for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro, as the
track has been used regularly over the past few years
for winter testing. In February of this year, the
Scuderia and Toyota were the only two squads running on
this desert track.
"In a sport as competitive as Formula 1, any advantage
we might have from our winter trip to the Gulf will
probably have evaporated by the end of Friday's free
practice, by which time the other teams will be on the
pace, having been here in past years," comments
Technical Director Aldo Costa.
"It's not even as though
the Scuderia can derive any tyre advantage as the winter
test was all conducted on just one hard type of
Bridgestone. The real advantage of the Sakhir winter
test is that, although temperatures back at the start of
the year were about ten degrees Celsius cooler than one
can expect this weekend, the venue did offer very stable
conditions, with consistent ambient and track
temperatures and this stability is always a highly
prized commodity when developing a new car."
Sakhir is one of the modern generation of circuits and
as such it comes with a comprehensive range of corner
types from a first gear hairpin to combinations of flat
out turns and long straights. It is wide, offering
different lines and there are some genuine overtaking
opportunities as demonstrated in the previous four
runnings of this event and it is also hard on brakes.
Ferrari has a fifty percent success rate in Bahrain,
having taken victory in the inaugural event in 2004
courtesy of Michael Schumacher and last year it was
Felipe Massa who was first past the chequered flag. In
fact, there are similarities between the situation our
Brazilian finds himself in now and that he encountered
twelve months ago. He had a difficult run over the first
couple of races and was very much in the media
spotlight, facing criticism to which he reacted in the
best possible way, by taking a convincing victory in the
desert.
Then as now, the team is fully confident that
Felipe, who likes this track and started on the front
row alongside pole man and team-mate Schumacher back in
'06, can put in another strong showing here. As for the
reigning world champion, Kimi Raikkonen has yet to win
here, but he showed fighting spirit in 2006 when,
relegated to the back of the grid because of an engine
change, he fought his way to the podium, finishing third
after a one-stop race.
During winter testing, nearly all teams seemed capable
of doing long distances reliably, but the first two
races of the season threw up problems throughout the
field. In both the real and metaphorical sense, this can
be put down to the heat of battle, as testing is never
quite as tough as racing and nowhere in testing did
teams experience the 40 degrees of heat we saw in
Melbourne or the humidity levels encountered in Sepang,
as unlike in 2007, this year there was no Malaysian test
session. And, it is clear that ten of the eleven teams
are still on a learning curve when it comes to the
common electronic control units.
The Scuderia has not been idle on the car front since
Sepang and last Saturday, tester Marc Gene evaluated
some aerodynamic elements at Vairano. "The plan for this
year is that we should have continuous updates
throughout the season," says Technical Director Aldo
Costa.
"We aim to improve the package step by step with
changes coming for almost every race and in Bahrain we
will run some new aero parts. We will continue to keep a
close eye on reliability, especially on the engine side
and on this front, at the moment, we will probably run Massa with the same engine he used in Malaysia, even
though we could change it, as he failed to finish that
race."
Since the last round, Felipe travelled home to spend
some time in Brazil, to put behind him the frustrations
of the first two races, while Kimi headed back to his
adopted Switzerland to enjoy some rather fresher air
than was on offer in Malaysia. Now, they are both
already in the Gulf, an area that is growing in
importance in F1 terms. Next year, apart from Bahrain,
this part of the world will see a second race staged in
Abu Dhabi. Ferrari has also got strong links in this
part of the world, firstly with sponsor and five percent
shareholder, Mubadala and now with new sponsor Etihad
Airways. Next year, apart from the race in Abu Dhabi,
the area also sees the opening of a Ferrari theme park
on Yas Island.
|
