The new Ferrari parts proved their worth in Barcelona, when Charles Leclerc took pole position, and his teammate Carlos Sainz finished the qualifying session in third position.
Crews can hold two days of filming or promotional events per season, and it is up to them to decide when and where to use them. They only have to comply with two restrictions : they must use Pirelli demo tires and travel up to a maximum of 100 kilometres.
Instead of using both days before the new car’s debut at the start of the season, like some of its rivals, Ferrari opted to reserve one so that it could be used to test the significant upgrade package before it was assembled for the first time in Spain.
Mercedes followed a similar strategy, with George Russell testing the new elements of the W13 at Paul Ricard.
While most other teams had to start from scratch in collecting data on their latest updates during Friday’s session in Barcelona, Ferrari were one step ahead from the start of the weekend.
“In a day of shooting you can do 100km, so the mileage is quite short,” said Chassis Operations Director Claudio Albertini , when asked by Motorsport.com about the value of the test.
“But it’s useful, because you can actually do some, let’s say, specific maneuvers that are difficult to do on a race track with the other cars.
“I would say it was useful to give us confidence about what we were doing because, in the end, with this short notice you can’t change things, because there isn’t enough time.”
“But it’s important because then you can trust what you’re doing, and you can have a better direction when you get to the circuit.”
“Nowadays the opportunities to do things on the track are not many, so you have to maximize everything.”
Albertini confirmed that Ferrari used the two cars, with different specifications, during the first practice session in Barcelona, and that only Carlos Sainz had the complete package at the start.
“We made a comparison between the two cars,” he explained. “So we used one car with the new full set-up, the other with the partial set-up, because we were already sure that most [of the changes] were fine after testing [during filming day], and so we compared the two cars in FP1, let’s say that from the second session we were able to put them on the same level”.
“Obviously we did some comparisons with the old parts, which is the normal job just to have a better correlation with the simulated data that we have at home, and the real data that can be measured in the car.”
“This cross-check [gave] a positive result on Friday. And so we decided to use the latest specification cars.”
“We kept it all for qualifying. So overall it was positive, and it all stayed with the car from the start.”
