Ferrari chief names ‘highest priority’ for testing as Barcelona event set to begin
Reliability is key to Ferrari success said one of its top engineers.
Ferrari’s Chassis Technical Director Loic Serra says reliability is one of the highest priorities for the team in the season ahead as testing is set to begin.
Teams will take to the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya from Monday to test for the season ahead but one of the people tasked with Ferrari’s chassis has been speaking about what they hope to achieve.
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While F1 teams have evolved massively since the early days of frequent retirements, reliability still remains a tricky task to master given the speed the cars are travelling at.
Doing so is the first step to any success and Serra suggested reliability is at the forefront of Ferrari’s thinking as they plan developments for the SF-26.
“I think reliability will be no more, no less important than the previous years,” he said to media including PlanetF1.com. So when you design solutions, you have in mind that it has to be reliable.
“But clearly, when you’re dealing with a new set of regulations, when you have new inputs, new constraints, you have to have in mind that, for example, when you design active aero, it’s not about the active aero itself only. It’s also finding solutions for it and making sure that these solutions are reliable.
“So I don’t think it’s more or less difficult. I think it remains one of the highest priorities of the development.”
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Even with the teams being guarded about what they have been working on behind closed doors, we have already seen a significant variation in the interpretation of the rules but Serra suggested he was confident Ferrari had chosen the right path.
“I don’t think it’s about risk,” the former Mercedes man said. “It’s about what we believe is in the right direction for the concept.
“When you are in the conceptual phase, you need to evaluate as many options as you can and the ones we chose at the time were the ones that were in the right direction for the concept.”
Asked specifically about the double diffuser seen on some of the team’s rivals, Serra insisted they paid no attention to that and were solely focused on what they had done so far.
“We have been focused on our car at the moment so I think you take a bit more time to get an idea of what the others are doing.
“I think Barcelona and the future tests will tell us a bit more about it.”
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