Ferrari is targeting problem free pit stops and hoping to gain more performance from its exhaust over the next few races.
The Italian team has dragged itself back into the hunt for victories at recent grands prix after it tapped into a rich vein of performance with a significant upgrade to the car at the British Grand Prix. It is confident there is still more to come, but has outlined wheel nuts and the car's exhaust as two areas for improvement at the upcoming races.
At the German Grand Prix Felipe Massa was heading for his best result of the season when a sticking wheel nut at his final stop lost him a place to Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel. Head of trackside operations Diego Ioverno admitted new wheel nuts introduced at the British Grand Prix still have a few teething problems.
"Since the beginning of the year we have had various issues with pit stops, which we are currently fixing step by step, knowing that this year, with so many stops, anything can happen and indeed we have seen other teams also experience difficulties in this area," admits Ioverno. "Our issues concerned the car itself and the jig of the tools we use and especially the wheel nuts, where we have had several problems.
"Silverstone was the first race we ran with a completely new specification of wheel nut, which has been very interesting, because in the British Grand Prix, our pit stops were the quickest in the race. Then, in Germany we were again using this new wheel nut, which does work better, but the system is still not perfect and, at Felipe's last tyre change, we lost the connection between the wheel nut and wheel nut gun, which cost us around one and a half seconds. So we have more work to do on perfecting it."
In terms of the car development, Ferrari chief designer Nikolas Tomabazis is targeting further upgrades to exhaust to capitalise on the car's new-found performance.
"We have made improvements in the area of the exhausts which we believe is an area that still has scope for progress," Tombazis said. "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."
The use of exhaust gases to improve aerodynamic performance will be outlawed in 2012, but Tombazis is not concerned about the limited long-term benefits.
"This is an area that delivers a clear performance gain so we have to spend some resources working on it," he said. "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."
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