21/02/2014
NEWS STORY
Ferrari's Director of Engineering, Pat Fry, remains philosophical following a day which saw Kimi Raikkonen's running compromised by a telemetry issue.
After two days of good mileage, and convincing pace, it was back down to earth with a bang for the Maranello outfit today as Raikkonen completed just 44 laps.
A telemetry glitch slowed the Finn's progress in the morning, but in the afternoon he managed to put in a decent number of laps even if he remained over 3s off Lewis Hamilton's pace. Nonetheless, there were no particular concerns in the Ferrari camp, as the problem was identified and solved.
"Today was a bit frustrating, because we were stopped for quite a time with a small but tricky problem," admitted Fry. "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.
"We will try to do our utmost to acquire the mass of data we want," he continued, looking ahead to tomorrow the final day of this week's testing. "Ideally, we don't want to change our operational plan for next week's test."
"It's hard to say where we are," he admitted, when asked about the state of play in relation to rival teams. "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."
Chris Balfe