Formula 1 News

Ferrari: back on track! 

Ferrari’s Sporting Director, Stefano Domenicali, praises Magny-Cours one-two: “We weren’t stupid before neither phenomena now, we’re strong and we’ve to remain aggressive and motivated. We’re approaching McLaren”.

Ferrari team is still alive. Maybe not yet unreachable, but more dangerous for sure. Yesterday at Magny-Cours, Ferrari has responded very well to McLaren’s double hit at Montreal and Indianapolis GP. This year’s first “one-two” is exactly what was needed in order to, restart the battle for the Championship, revitalize the atmosphere and put some pressure onto her rivals. Hamilton had Raikkonen’s reactiveness on race start, Alonso had technical problems during the tests: these are small marks that demonstrate that McLaren is not unbeatable.

Big “slap” – Even Stefano Domenicali is convinced about: “In Indianapolis, both McLaren gave us a big “slap” – said Ferrari’s Sporting Director – yesterday in France, i’m not sure if we have given back it yet. Surely, at Indianapolis we expected more from our team. But we demonstrated one thing for sure: we’re still here, we have a good package, a good team, good drivers”.

Traffic is crucial – “We’ve passed a difficult moment – Domenicali said – we’re satisfied even if we know that we have to demonstrate this continuity right away this Sunday at Silverstone. We weren’t stupid before, we’re not phenomena now. We’ve seen how important is to start form first row, without having traffic in front of us. It’s a crucial element for this year. Our main rivals (McLaren team) had difficulties having found traffic in front of them, this demonstrates that the approach we had on Magny-Cours weekend, was the right one; a much more aggressive one. The 29 second gap from McLaren is realistic? I really don’t know. We don’t have to overestimate or either underestimate this type of information. It depends from race to race”.

Closer – For Silverstone’s Grand Prix, Ferrari team will have other engine and aerodynamic innovations in order to continue McLaren’s run-up. “We don’t have to be confident for being 30 seconds ahead of Hamilton – Domenicali said – we’ve to be happy for recovering 10pts in Constructor’s Championship and closer to McLaren. This has been the most important thing of this weekend. We know that, sometimes, the gap isn’t real. Our engines faced the second consecutive Grand Prix and the important thing is that we’ve finished the race with both vehicles without any single problem. We’ve to be more aggressive and more motivated in order to reduce the gap as quickly a possible”.