Ferrari F60

[Fil]

Astro, your argument makes sense if the teams know where they lay in the pecking order. but if they don't know where they stand compared to the next team, how do they know what the goals are and if they can afford to play "sports" things and sandbag?

at this stage surely it is full steam ahead for all teams with only a glancing curious eye at the opposition.

[Roland Ehnström]

Absolutely, at this point it makes no sense to study the opposition, all teams need to work 100% on making their own cars as fast as possible. After Australia, when everyone KNOWS which cars are fast and which are not, THEN it's time to start copying what the fast guys are running.

[Ciro Pabón]

Yes, I agree with Roland and Fil. Besides, this year rule changes are profound. I expect changes in the pecking order.

[Spencifer_Murphy]

Of course, personally I don't really get the concept of sandbagging...just get on with it and ignore the mid games.

BUT

Say your in Ferrari, the car is clearly quick of of the box (say on the shakedown u tell Felipe, "Only give it 70%"" and he sets a time in excess o what you expected then maybe running race simulations with an extra 10laps of fuel allows you to hide your true total pace, BUT still allows for realistic race simulations.

I never meant to imply that the car is capable of prodigeous speed and they are running 100kgs over weight or anything crazy like that. Just that it COULD be the car is quick, very quick even, but they're happy to keep SOME of their cards close to their chest...for the time being at least.

You never know.

[Scotracer]

First top speed for the Ferrari F60:

Bahrain pit-straight: 311km/h
In 2008 quali: 314km/h (Massa) 311km/h (Kimi)

[Roland Ehnström]

You never know.

No-one here claims to know. Heck, at this stage I bet even Ferrari themselves do not know if they are going to be fast or not this year. But what we can do, is to speculate on a basis of the facts we have at hand: The laptimes posted day by day from the pre-season tests. Judging by these laptimes, which once again is the only thing we have to go by at this stage, we can speculate that maybe Ferrari are not quite as quick this year as they were at the same point least season. That's all I am saying, no more, no less. It is absolutely possible that I am completely wrong, since very many factors are unknown, but if we talk in terms of probability, the facts we have at hand (the laptimes) point towards it being probable that Ferrari are slower this year than last year. Do I make any sense?

[Fil]

The pecking order at Bahrain was Ferrari over BMW by a tenth or two. That much seems to have been confirmed by Gene and Klien. Neither mentioned Toyota at all, so they're clearly not concerned by them..

Ferrari definitely don't seem to have that same air of confidence they had last year. Their outlook on their KERS system is glaringly more positive than their overall speed.

[Moanlower]

The times or speed measured during latest test still means nothing. At least not when it comes to tenths since all cars will have quite big changes to the car untill Melbourne. The teams are also running different test programs, not to mention different fuel loads etc.. The most important thing is how fast your car is compared to others when it matters. Having the least DNF's will also be crucial this season. Thats why a lot of teams chose to play safe and not running with KERS until they get a bit desperate or very certain about its reliability.

[Professor]

Sandbagging..... If one determined that sandbagging was useful one would just dogg one sector of a lap. The laptime would be modest but the other two sectors would be useful information. If you ran three laps with the same setup and combined the fastest sectors of all three laps into a composite time, you could determine the true pace, but somewhat obscure that fact from others.

But, I'm not convinced of the usefulness of sandbagging. There's too much work to do to be playing games. I have no idea who has the advantage at this point.

[Afterburner]

Following the "portuguese autosport", on the recent Bahrain week test, bmw had the edge on race pace, according to that magazine they were focusing on race simulations and the F1.09 proved to be very fast and very smooth on the rear tires.


In my opinion sandbagging wouldn't be to wiise to do after so many changes this year, that would become an even more difficult task for the drivers and engineers to understand the behaviour off the cars.

[mx_tifoso]

Costa speaks about problems with the new F60, but what interests me is the expirement on the gearbox. I wonder what sort of expirement he's talking about? Simple reliability testing but with super high mileage? Lubrication? Materials? Design?

[pipex]

What experiment mx?? i have not heard anything...
i didn't read the news in the site

[Moanlower]

What experiment mx?? i have not heard anything...
i didn't read the news in the site

The interview with Costa can be read on top of this page, also on almost any other F1 news site. He just mentioned they had some small issues or failures by testing and also experimenting with the gearbox.

[Rikhart]

That interview is like a week old or more.

[mx_tifoso]

The age of the interview is irrelevant...

But here is a quote of what I was referring to:

"There might be some problems ahead, like the ones we've had over the past two days with the completely new components of the KERS, or with experiments, like the ones we had on the gearbox."

EDIT: What I'm interested in is what could the experiments possibly be? Thats my point.