Tombazis: We want more wins under our belt

Chief Designers are not a common sight at Grands Prix as they have no specific role at the race track. In addition, we are approaching the time of year when their focus shifts solidly to next year’s car. Therefore the F1 media were delighted to find that Scuderia Ferrari’s Chief Designer, Nikolas Tombazis was here at the ‘Ring and prepared to answer questions.

The first one concerned which areas of the 150º Italia are currently undergoing work. “We have made improvements in the area of the exhausts which we believe is an area that still has scope for progress,” began Tombazis. “After the various rule clarifications we have a slightly clearer view of what we need to do over the next few races to improve in that area. We believe there is quite a bit of performance to be gained there. In addition, from this race onwards we have a new design of rear brake duct, while at the last race we introduced a new rear wing and that is another area where we continue to push on development, because with the introduction this year of DRS, it is something where there is scope for improvement. We also have a fairly pushy front wing programme which should produce some further developments over the next few races.”

Precisely because next year’s car is on the horizon, the designer was asked how much resource can continue to be put into the 2011 model, specifically the blown diffuser which will be banned next season. “This is an area that delivers a clear performance gain so we have to spend some resources working on it,” maintained Tombazis. “There are many more races to go and we want to get more wins under our belt so we will continue working on it, even if it has no bearing on next year’s car, while other developments we are using now will also be useful for the 2012 car. It will not be a case of starting with a clean sheet of paper, but the degree of change for next year will be quite big. Silverstone showed a performance improvement and we have qualified better here than we would have done a few months ago. The developments we have in the pipeline for the next few races should see us being competitive in future races for the rest of this season.”

The long term for Formula 1 has been mapped out recently, including major changes three years down the line. “The rules which will apply from 2014 affect many areas, the most important of course being the engine,” said the Chief Designer. “However, it is currently a bit too early to start work on that programme. At the moment, our main objective is three fold: one is to win more races this year, the next is we are applying a fresh approach to next year, as we believe we have not performed to our normal standards for the last couple of years, so that we can fight genuinely for the championship from the front of the field. The third objective is that our engine colleagues produce a package that will fit nicely into whatever the car is going to be in 2014, but we cannot claim to have already started research into that.”