I’m really enjoying the debate we’ve been having about whether Felipe Massa did anything more than hit “enter” to “post” his latest Ferrari blog.
The team’s now posted Fernando Alonso’s latest from China, and I think they’ve been peaking into our conversation because this time they made sure to include a “for sure” in the post.
Er, I mean Alonso, who of course wrote this, finishes with a “for sure!” flourish!
It’s really cold in China! I arrived here on Monday and you can’t see anything of spring yet. It’s not even ten degrees today and in the late morning it started raining non-stop. The weather should improve for the race weekend, but we’ve got to be ready for everything. It wouldn’t be for the first time that the Chinese GP is held under variable weather conditions, just remember 2009 or 2007. I was at the track for a couple of hours, speaking to my engineers. We spoke about the situation and analysed the details of the data from Malaysia – Sunday night was just a quick summary – and the F10’s development programme. We’ve got some new aerodynamic parts, which should improve our performance. But I also expect our main competitors to show up with updates, so it’s impossible right now to say where we are: we’ll discover that on Saturday afternoon in the qualifying. I’ve got confidence in our work. We’ve shown that we can be competitive on every kind of track, where we raced so far – during the races and at the test sessions in February. So there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be the same in China.
The Shanghai circuit is very interesting. There are all kinds of corners and a long straight with a very tight right-hand corner at the end: there are always plenty of overtaking manoeuvres taking place here.
As usual the qualifying will be very important and we have to check the tyres’ behaviour very carefully. They are the same we’ve been using in Australia and in Malaysia but with lower temperatures. We need to gain many points to conclude this first part of the Championship the best possible way, before we come to Europe. There will be a long break after Shanghai and the drivers and the teams can charge their batteries before the European races start. We’ll all benefit from that, that’s for sure!
Wait a minute! Did I miss the breaking news here! It sounds like Ferrari is using KERS!! :)
That aside, I call this blog less interesting than Massa’s, which other sites have run with as saying he’s worried about the McLaren F-duct. Massa does highlight McLaren’s straight-line speed, but he never mentions the F-duct out right. And, other than during practice in Malaysia, I haven’t been super impressed by Macca’s speed. Lewis Hamilton couldn’t get around Adrian Sutil during the last race, and it took Hamilton a controversial set of moves to hold of Vitaly Petrov.
McLaren, despite Jenson Button’s win, Hamilton’s climb up the grid in Malaysia and the team’s standing in the points, has not overwhelmed me. I think the team is closer to Mercedes GP (and maybe Renault and even Force India) than it is to Ferrari and Red Bull.
We’ll see in a few days.
