Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo has upped the pressure on his team to improve after what he considered to be another below-par performance at the Chinese Grand Prix.
"This cannot and must not be the team's level," he said. "It's a very delicate moment. I expect our engineers to act with determination and know-how, unleashing the maximum of their capacity to improve the performance of the car in a short time. I want Ferrari to be at the level that both we and our fans demand it should be."
Ferrari's drivers have yet to finish on the podium or qualify on the front two rows of the grid this season, as the team has failed to live up to the promise it showed during winter testing. The problems appear to stem from the final upgrade package added at the Barcelona test ahead of the Australian Grand Prix, which, according to technical director Aldo Costa, looked good in the wind tunnel but did not provide a significant performance boost on track.
"In the winter development, in the last test, we have tested a lot of new components and some of them are not delivering the performance expected, so we started an investigation so we are doing correlation job between the track and the wind tunnel, trying to understand why that should be," Costa said in China. "A Formula One car, these days, is a very very complex aerodynamic machine so there are a lot of vortices that can interfere one with the other. It's not only happened to us, it's happened from time to time that developments are not bringing the expected performance. So we are doing this investigation and we think that by Turkey we should be able to answer all our questions."
Team principal Stefano Domenicali, who is already back in Maranello for a full day's work on Monday, warned there might not be a quick fix.
"This championship has not started the way we would have wanted or hoped for," he admitted after Sunday's race. "Our car definitely needs to improve its performance, especially in qualifying. We must work very hard over the coming weeks, especially on the aerodynamics. We know our problems can't be solved by waving a magic wand, all in one go, especially as our rivals are not going to sit around twiddling their thumbs: all the same, we need to take a step in the right direction, right from the next race."
Fernando Alonso is now concerned Ferrari is losing ground to its rivals.
"We know we have to improve to get to the front: McLaren and Mercedes have managed it and there is no reason to think we can't do the same," he said. "Clearly, aerodynamics is our Achilles Heel at the moment and that's what we have to work on the most. Eight days ago in Malaysia we had seen some encouraging signs, but that was not the case here: the car has not changed, while others have made progress."
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