Third day of testing for Scuderia Ferrari at the Sakhir circuit in Bahrain. A telemetry glitch slowed Kimi Raikkonen’s progress in the morning, but in the second part of the day, the Finn managed to put in a good number of laps. There were no particular concerns in the Ferrari camp, as the problem was identified and solved. Director of Engineering, Pat Fry had this to say at the end of the day.
“Today was a bit frustrating, because we were stopped for quite a time with a small but tricky problem. We knew that sooner or later we would have to deal with some problems and that was what happened. These things happen with a new car; some things that seem difficult turn out to be easy and others that appear simple get more complicated and we are still learning.”
However, the team still aims to get through the planned programme, trying to make the most of the time available tomorrow. “We will try to do our utmost to acquire the mass of data we want. Ideally, we don’t want to change our operational plan for next week’s test.”
Talking to journalists, Fry was asked the usual question about the state of play among the teams. “It’s hard to say where we are. We knew we’d be facing a very complicated winter with a lot of unknown factors. That was the case, but in Maranello we have done a lot of work and I can see that it’s difficult for everyone to move forward on the development front with so many new systems and so little time to test them.”