F1: Ferrari Checking Wind Tunnel Says Costa

Formula 1

F1: Ferrari Checking Wind Tunnel Says Costa

Ferrari technical director Aldo Costa says Ferrari is trying to find a correlation between its results on the track and wind tunnel results...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted April 15, 2011 Shanghai (CHN)

Aldo Costa addresses reporters at Friday's news conference in China. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Ferrari technical director Aldo Costa admits that the team is questioning the correlation between the wind tunnel and the track, after its disappointing start to the season.

In the past teams have often been misled by issues with their wind tunnels, which can go unchecked for some months.

“In the winter development, in the last test, we have tested a lot of new components and as I already said, some of them are not delivering the performance expected,” said Costa. “So we started an investigation, so we are doing correlation job between the track and the wind tunnel, trying to understand why that should be.

“A Formula One car, these days, is a very, very complex aerodynamic machine so there are a lot of vortices that can interfere one with the other. It’s not only happened to us, it’s happened from time to time that developments are not bringing the expected performance. So we are doing this investigation and we think that by Turkey we should be able to answer all our questions.”

Costa and other senior engineers dashed back to Maranello in the short break after Malaysia, but he denied it was for any kind of emergency summit.

“The purpose is normal — go back home and spend a few days at home between one race or another. It was not an emergency going back to Maranello. It was already programmed. Of course, we have to catch up. We are quite behind, as we have seen in the first two races, so at home people are really motivated to progress and we were discussing, as usual, development programs and which bits we can bring to the races, how many parts we can anticipate at what race and all this usual stuff.

“But being with a good awareness where we are at this moment in terms of performance so people are really, really pushing to catch up and really motivated to come back to the performance we would like to have.”

Meanwhile, Costa says the team had an inconclusive day on Friday in China.

“It was not a very clean practice session both this morning and this afternoon, mainly with Fernando (Alonso). Felipe (Massa) did his program with no big issues. With Fernando, we experienced two hydraulic leakages on the same detail, zero kilometer, component, so there must be some, let’s say, quality or finger problem, so we have to see and solve for tomorrow.

“About the performance, we did with Fernando quite a lot of tests this morning, in terms of aero tests, I mean. Quite a lot of constant speed, so not a lot of real running to test new pieces and test different configurations, so quite interesting to us. We concentrated with Felipe on tires, to try to understand better the tires in this not-very-hot environment.”

Adam Cooper notched up his 26th season as a racing journalist in 2010. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.