Klia: To stay ahead of Mercedes you have to improve

There are only four races left until the end of the season, and at this stage of the championship, Ferrari is still fighting for pole positions and sometimes winning them: after the August break in the championship, this was the case at Spa, Monza and Singapore . That’s just the Italian team that hasn’t been able to win races lately.

Over the weekend in Monza, during training sessions on Friday, Scuderia engineers conducted comparative tests of the two versions of the underbody installed on F1-75, in an attempt to determine the reasons for the speed drop. It turned out that the upgraded elements as a whole work quite efficiently. This allowed the work to continue in the chosen direction, and in Japan the next version of this main area of ​​​​the aerodynamic body kit appeared on Ferrari cars.

“We have received confirmation that we are moving in the right direction and that was extremely important,” said Jock Klia, Chief Race Engineer Ferrari. – As soon as there are questions like, “Maybe we’ve approached the settings wrong?”, you need to be brave and immediately find out what’s going on. You can’t just keep doing what you’re doing.

This can be compared to this situation: if you get lost, the worst thing is to just go further down the road and say to yourself, “Let’s see what lies ahead.” No, we have to stop and look at the map. That’s exactly what we did.

We may have been told that our pace has slowed down a bit in the last five races, but we can’t ignore the fact that you need to figure out exactly which direction to go first. So we stopped, “checked the map” and got confirmation that the direction had been chosen correctly.

According to Klia, the team has no doubts about this, and another confirmation was the results of qualifying in Suzuka, where Charles Leclerc got only 0.010 seconds from pole position and Carlos Sainz showed the third result, also losing a lot to Max Verstappen – 0.057 seconds . In the race, however, the Ferrari drivers didn’t look so convincing: right after the start, the Spaniard crashed the car on a flooded track and Leclerc’s tires had worn out too quickly.

Nevertheless, the Scuderia believes that in Japan they have been able to verify the effectiveness of new products.

“Everything works,” Klia continued. – We expected that Red Bull would be very strong in Suzuka, because this track is similar to Spa, where they beat us very well. But we are very happy that they almost kept up with them in Japan. In fact we were very upset because we missed pole position.

The process of modernizing technology is organic. Most teams have already switched to preparing for next year. Of course we want to be more competitive in 2023. As soon as we stop working with the F1-75 at the end of November, we will immediately resume the research in the wind tunnel and start using the simulator again, but we are already solving other problems.

In the meantime, we have to make the most of the last few races, keep refining the car and take it to the next level. Of course we understand that it is almost impossible to win the constructors’ championship, but we have to stay ahead of Mercedes and for that we have to improve. In addition, we also want to increase our confidence in the process of equipment modernization, which is necessary to prepare for the next year.”