That was, curiously, sort of advantage in the Ferrari team because they could see Rubens performance as an indicator of car potential, they knew rapidly that there was something wrong and they could also see the immediate effect of any modifications.
In fact, still according to Baldisseri, it was sometimes lot more difficult to find the optimal setup for MS than for Rubens, not because MS needed the perfect setup to deliver but exactly because of the opposite.
MS can be very fast also if the car isn’t perfect hence it’s sometimes very difficult to operate the fine tuning, to find that modification that makes the difference between a good setup and a “perfect” one, because the difference will be small anyway.
That’s the reason why some times your heard that MS “copied” the setup from Rubens and never heard the opposite, not because of favouritism or, as some suggest sometimes, because MS didn’t share info/telemetry with Rubens, but simply because if MS had a completely wrong setup he could use Rubens one and he could be fast with it, if Rubens was lost, MS setup wouldn’t have helped anyway.
For the same reason, as others noticed, to know if the Ferrari cars were good or not, you simply had to look at the performance difference between MS and Rubens, the bigger the difference the worse the car.
At Honda the Rubens problem could be more difficult to solve because, as far as I’ve heard, Button has similarly the need to have the setup perfectly suited to him to perform, but not necessarily he has the same needing as Rubens. At Ferrari they could follow Rubens indications knowing that that wasn’t going to limit MS anyway, on the contrary it was going to improve the car.
What remains to be seen is if at Honda they can do the same thing, but there’s the risk that they could have to follow slightly separate development directions.
In an interview I saw at the start of the season Rubens himself said he still has different pedal setting compared with teammate, I assume it means that he still brakes with right foot.DR_K13 wrote: Rubens has to left foot brake in the honda. He was a right footer in the Ferrari/
