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Does the Ferrari team boss get a watchdog?
Taken from BILD, the German publication – the story asks if Ferrari needs a ‘watch-dog’ character to help the team, similar to Mercedes Niki Lauda or Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko.
GOOGLE TRANSLATE –
Winter is getting tough in Maranello. Many snow-white faces among the reds. You know: YOU screwed up the WDC. Overslept. Thrown away.
The list of mistakes of the team and the driver Sebastian Vettel (31) is long.
There were too many races in the second half when Ferrari was weakening. “We overslept a few weeks,” Vettel expressed his conclusion this season. Only in the US and last week in Mexico did they return to their old strength.
For months, the team burdened an internal conflict between team boss Maurizio Arrivabene (61) and Technical Director Mattia Binotto (49).
This should not be finished now, but at least for the time being.
As can be heard from the Ferrari environment, Arrivabene – after a brief rumor that he could change as a boss to Juventus Turin – in future hold the reins of the red horse in Maranello even more firmly in the hand.
Arrivabene has the full backing of new Ferrari boss Louis Camilleri (63). That makes sense. The Egypt-born manager was before the deceased in June Sergio Marchionne († 66) chief executive officer of the same tobacco company in which Arrivabene had last worked.
When Arrivabene took office four years ago, he bet on “Italy first”. Ferrari is an Italian team and you do not necessarily need so many international minds.
But when key positions in the factory (including Chief of Technology James Allison, now Mercedes) were exchanged, mistakes and negligence crept in, extremely visible this season. Rain tires in the dry and dry tires in the rain in qualifying in Japan was one of the most visible.
The statement by the Ferrari team boss after the Monza humiliation of Mercedes to Italian journalists: “I hire drivers and no butlers.” What he meant: Unlike Mercedes, there is no stall order at Ferrari.
Very honorable. But while Lewis Hamilton had a helper in teammate Valtteri Bottas, Vettel in Kimi Raikkonen had an opponent more.
It is conceivable that Arrivabene gets a Formula 1 connoisseur to the side, which is officially under him, but internally monitors the cooperation and ensures especially in pressure situations for rest.
A role like Dr. Helmut Marko (75) at Red Bull and Niki Lauda (69) at Mercedes. For years, there has been a big gap at Ferrari.
That would also help Vettel, who recently looked strikingly often the conversation with his former team Red Bull.
Driver-Dr. Marko to BamS: “Sebastian had bad luck in the crucial moments, Mercedes was already on the ground. But he just had to take more risk often. If the pressure is there, we know that it is often handled differently in Italy than in northern countries. ”
To take pressure from the four-time champion, instead of this 2019 after another untitled year to build on – Ferrari succeeds, increase the chances of the first driver title since 2007 by itself.
It’s been an enormous shock, admits Williams
.”As the season has progressed, certainly in the earlier races, it was an enormous shock,” she admits.
“I couldn’t quite believe that Williams was repeatedly finding itself down at the bottom of the grid, either in qualifying or the race. And I don’t think I’ve quite gotten over that shock yet. All I know is that there are two races to go and I can’t wait until the chequered flag in Abu Dhabi, if I’m allowed to say that.”
“Clearly we’ve had countless meetings with Paddy, with the whole technical group,” she admits, when asked about the various shortcomings of the FW41, which, let’s not forget, is powered by that same all-conquering Mercedes engine. “Clearly there are a number of issues at play but I’m not a one to air dirty laundry.
“One of the things that I’m proudest of this year is that the team has really stuck together,” she says. “We could have imploded, we could have all started a load of in-fighting, we could have sacked half the people, but that’s not the way that I wanted this to play out.
“Of course we’ve had conversations, and we know the clear areas of weakness. I think probably the world can see the biggest areas of weakness for us, and of course there has to be accountability. We have to look at where we’ve gone wrong.
“Probably aero we went wrong with, cooling we went wrong with, but there are many other factors at play. You don’t find yourself sliding back from P5 to P10 in the championship without a lot of other things at play as well. It’s not just about how we went about designing our race car over the winter.”
“All I can say is we’re doing every single thing possible to make sure that we address every single problem that we have in this team in order to make sure 2019 is better for us,” she says. But if it’s not, at least I know that we’re setting ourselves up for certainly a better future beyond that.”
Interlagos, 1975
Whereabouts on this track are we? Hint, it’s a different circuit configuration than we’re used to seeing.
Red Bull’s F1 fuel supplier calls oil burn process ‘backwards’
David Tsurusaki, global motorsports technology manager of ExxonMobil, which supplies Red Bull and sister team Toro Rosso, thinks the limit that allows an engine to burn 0.6-litres of oil per 100 kilometres is out of kilter with what is acceptable in road cars.
“Our view of consuming oil in an internal combustion engine is that it is not the direction that the best in racing and the best in innovation and technology for an engine should be working to,” Tsurusaki told Autosport.
“That is backwards.”
“Our biggest concern is that if they leave the 0.6l per 100km consumption level as is, that means you are allowed to consume that much oil – and that is a lot.
“If you consumed that level of oil in your car, you would have to carry a spare tank of oil around with you!
“The problem is that if you are giving people a number, which we think is a high number, then you are promoting it in a sense for them to find ways to use it because that oil has an energy content.”
“It is not something we have worked on,” he said. “We don’t work on finding ways to use oil as fuel: we work on using oil as oil and fuel as fuel.
“I know that you do get oil into a combustion chamber on a natural basis – but that is not intentional.
“The more they clamp down on that, the better it should be for the direction of the premier motorsports category.
“It should not be burning oil: it just sounds weird to me.”
Didn’t lauda have a similar role at the Italian team, in the past?
According to Wikipedia he did from 1993, before he became teammanager at Jaguar
and we all remember what happened at Jaguar