Formula 1 News

Ferrari: “McLaren ECU won’t cause problems” 

Starting this year the FIA has imposed to Formula One Teams the usage of a standard electronic control unit (ECU) provided by McLaren, but some teams have had problems getting their engine characteristics suited to this new ECU. Among those teams Ferrari, has criticized a lot McLaren’s ECU; despite that, Ferrari’s Engine Chief Gilles Simon, appeared quite confident today at F2008′s presentation when asked on the MES…

Gilles Simon: “We’ve worked on the MES (standard ECU) system since June,” Simon said during the launch of Ferrari’s new car in Italy. It’s a different system with a different architecture, so it requires our knowledge of the system. We are at a reasonably good point in the way we utilize the system. We are not ready to go racing at the moment, but we still have two months ahead of us. With this ECU we found some problems, from a safety point of view as well, but they have all been solved. Obviously such a big system change gave us some difficulties as it has to every team that were not used to this ECU. This certainly gave a lot of problems to MES too, as it was not used to such a massive workload of working with every team in parallel. Obviously MES has a better knowledge of the ECU than we have. Clearly at the moment there is an advantage for who knows this system, but we have a very strong group from an electronics point of view that will enable us to be competitive, but obviously we need to make a bigger effort than anyone else to get to this level.”