Ferrari has confirmed a couple of new recruits, notably former Bridgestone tyre engineer Hirohide Hamashima, who will work to work on matching the tyres to the cars. The team has also hired Steve Clark from Mercedes to head race engineering.
January 11, 2012 by Joe Saward
Ferrari has confirmed a couple of new recruits, notably former Bridgestone tyre engineer Hirohide Hamashima, who will work to work on matching the tyres to the cars. The team has also hired Steve Clark from Mercedes to head race engineering.
Didn’t Clark work at Mercedes?
I am concerned for Mclaren. It seems that every other day I read about a key member of staff leaving for other teams. Am I wrong? Wh yhasn’t anyone picked up on this?
Is there actually anybody left at Woking? I picture a group of Young Apprentices building the mp4/27 while they wait for Bob Bell to phone.
Without wanting to sound entirely stupid (but I often do) “matching the tyres to the cars” seems like a relatively simple job, I mean, there’s no actual choice is there?
Or is his job going to be more detailed in trying to find ways to optimise the Ferrari’s use of tyres to reap the maximum benefits?
If it was easy, they would not hire specialists…
Dear oh dear LOL…
That one’s round and black, left rear… This one’s round and black, front left.. Square one!!!!! WTF do we do now?
See, not so simple after all!
Think back to MSC’s success at Maranello, driven in large part by Ferrari so comprehensively integrating the tyres with the whole system. I’d also imagine some of their ‘correlation’ issues might have been traced back to the tyres.
This year the Pirellis have a slightly more squared-off shoulder on the fronts, so straight away theres an advantage to being the team who best copes with this change (if you don’t think it matters then remember that all those fancy wing end-plates and the 09 wheel covers were all about getting airflow sorted around the front wheels).
It’s probably too soon to use the word exodus or say Mclaren is turning into Williams but it’s not exactly sounding healthy at Woking!
It’s a bit late to hire a tyre engineer as they’ve had this same problem with tyres for ages. When Kimi joined the team with his relatively smooth driving style, the problem became blatantly obvious especially in 2008 and then they curiously and idiotically made it even worse during the 2008 season in the time when Kimi was leading the WDC.
Now they are fixing the problems that they should have fixed in mid-2008 by the latest especially since the problem was known in 2007 as well, and I think they knew about it in 2005 as well. It puzzles my mind how such a ‘great’ team can react so slowly to such an obvious problem.
I think firing Aldo Costa was one good move to solve this problem as he seemed very stubborn about the way they had designed the car to use its tyres and he even went as far as saying that he doesn’t listen to what Kimi says (?!). How can you do something as stupid as that with someone you are paying millions a year? It’s very irresponsible to lead the team in such a manner and it is right Mr. Costa was fired for this stupidity, but Domenicali apparently still holds his job and he would be equally as responsible as Costa was. Thank goodness for the Brits for their efforts to try to save the team – let’s see can they work around the politics.