Two-car test wouldn’t be ‘efficient’ for Ferrari

Jamie Woodhouse
Ferrari SF1000

Luigi Mazzola, formerly responsible of the test team of Ferrari, believes a two-car approach at pre-season testing wouldn’t be “efficient”.

It was a strategy deployed by Mercedes last year as they used the two weeks of testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya to test different cars in each week.

But they have confirmed already that this won’t be repeated in 2020, and Mazzola was clear that it would not be “efficient” for Ferrari to test two cars either.

Speaking on the Pit Talk podcast, he said: ”I don’t think it’s very efficient to bring two different cars to the test with just one week in between.”

Ferrari are hoping to mount a serious title challenge in 2020 – last year a poor first half of the season meant that by the time they had brought the SF90 up to its optimum level, the damage had already been done by Mercedes, while a fair few strategical blunders didn’t help either.

But the stable regulations between 2019 and 2020 give hope of a continuation of what we saw last year, that being Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull ending the season closely matched.

And the limited regulatory changes is the main reason why Mazzola sees no value in testing two cars, but said that the Scuderia did do it in the past when major alterations were made.

“This is a usual practice, when you bring a totally renewed single-seater car on the track in all respects (hydraulic, motor, cooling, etc …), to allow a sort of break-in and verification of reliability, only after that will [the team] test a car on track with the modifications tested in the wind tunnel,” he explained.

“Between one test session and another there are five days, but in 5 days it’s not that you can change that much.”

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