By Jonathan Noble Thursday, March 20th 2008, 06:55 GMT


Ferrari are confident that their engine problems that marred their Australian Grand Prix were a one-off, after getting to the bottom of what caused their dramas in Melbourne.

The Italian team suffered a double engine failure on Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen's cars at Albert Park, and flew the power units back to their Maranello base for analysis of what caused the malfunctions.

This work has established that the higher-than-expected temperatures in Australia contributed to a fuel-feel problem, which in turn led to a failure of the intake valves of the engines.

A Ferrari spokesman told autosport.com in Malaysia: "It was a fuel-feed problem partly related to the hot temperatures in Melbourne. It provoked a failure of the intake valve on both engines.

"It wasn't a quality control problem, nor was it a cooling problem. Obviously, you can't change these engines so we will work hard on improving the mapping, but we're confident this was a one-off."

Ferrari have also rubbished any talk that their problems were related to the introduction of the standard ECU in Formula One this year.

"It was not an ECU problem, although the new units do mean we have to learn new methods to operate the engine," added the spokesman.