Allison ‘reasonably happy’ with new Ferrari

by - 1/21/2014 09:06:00 p.m.

Ferrari technical director James Allison says he is “reasonably happy” with where the team is after two days of pre-season testing.

Kimi Raikkonen was quickest on the opening day of the first day at Jerez and followed that up with the second quickest time on Wednesday while completing 47 laps. Asked how happy he was with the progress made by Ferrari in terms of understanding its car and ironing out problems, Allison admitted it had been an encouraging start.

“I'm reasonably happy by what we've seen so far,” Allison said. “I don't think there are any killers that we've uncovered. Of course the faults list is not a short one – it never is with a new car – but we are able to keep getting out of the garage and going round the laps and our relative lack of laps compared with the V8 era is not about the fundamental reliability of the package it's about us making sure we don't make mistakes with what we're programming in to it.”

Allison also had praise for the work done by the engine division at Ferrari in supplying the design team with a well-packaged power unit in order to allow greater flexibility with the F14-T's aerodynamics.

“The overall philosophy of the car is, on the power unit side, that everybody has got the same amount of fuel; whoever can make the engine most efficient will have the most power, so the engine guys have been working long and hard for that. At the same time they've been aggressive and bending over backwards for us on the chassis side to make sure they produce an engine that is packageable, that allows itself to be cooled with radiators that are manageably packageable on the car. You see our car has got quite a neat cooling package and the bodywork is quite small – that's part of what the engine guys have done to provide that for us.

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