Friday, January 30, 2015

Ferrari: Italian team target two Formula 1 wins in 2015

Ferrari have unveiled the new SF15-T car they hope will start them on the long road back to Formula 1 success.

The Italian team have made major management changes, sacking a tranche of senior staff, following their worst season for more than 20 years in 2014.
Ferrari have unveiled the new SF15-T car they hope will start them on the long road back to Formula 1 success....

New team principal Maurizio Arrivabene set the target of winning "at least two races" in 2015 after none last year.

Four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel joins Kimi Raikkonen at the team as a replacement for Fernando Alonso.

"There is a lot of change going on, a lot of new people in new positions," said Vettel, who has moved from Red Bull.

"It takes time to settle in, but I am confident we are going in the right direction. But it would be wrong to expect a lot of us."

He added: "It will be difficult to be right there from the beginning, but the main target is to catch up more and more as the season progresses." 
Ferrari have unveiled the new SF15-T car they hope will start them on the long road back to Formula 1 success.....

 Vettel has already described driving for Ferrari as a lifelong dream.

"Starting the season will be something special," he said. "Everything red and it is a special colour.

"It means so much, with so much history. I am really looking forward to it."

Last year, Ferrari failed to win any races and managed only two podium finishes with Alonso.

The new car is clearly an evolution of its predecessor and carries a strong resemblance to it in many areas, although it has more tightly packaged bodywork at the rear in search of better aerodynamics.

 The most obvious change is to the nose section, where the previous 'vacuum cleaner' design has been replaced by a smoother, longer nose reminiscent of that on the new McLaren that was unveiled on Thursday.

Ferrari have retained their unconventional pull-rod front suspension system, which has the suspension arm running from the top of the upright to the bottom of the chassis rather than the other way around.

"Last year, we had an unacceptably large gap in our performance and we have tried to ensure the weaknesses on the '14 car were put right," said technical director James Allison.

Ferrari's car struggled in engine performance and Allison said a lot of attention had been paid to improving the power-unit, in terms of raw power, driveability and effectiveness of the energy recovery systems.

Ferrari hope to benefit from a change in regulations allowing limited in-season engine development to help them close the gap on Mercedes.

Allison added: "A definite weakness of last year's car was that the amount of electrical energy we were able to recover from the turbo was not really good enough for producing competitive power levels during the race.

"It was one of the reasons Ferrari's qualifying performance was relatively stronger than race performance last year.

"We have tried to change the architecture of the engine to make it a better compromise between qualifying and racing performance."

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