Crucial weekend for BMW – Heidfeld

Date published : 04 Jun 2009 - 13:17:00

Nick Heidfeld reckons BMW faces its second important race weekend of the season in Turkey, the team banking on the introduction of a double diffuser to start turning its disappointing season around.The Hinwil squad first pinpointed the Spanish GP last month as the race to start moving back up the grid with Barcelona the venue for its first major aerodynamic upgrade of the year and the team duly claimed a morale-boosting seventh place.But at the very next round the team s F1.09 proved ill-suited to the unique demands of Monte Carlo and it slumped to its worst ever weekend as an F1 constructor.BMW will finally race with a double-decker diffuser this weekend and Heidfeld admits it s crucial the upgrade coincides with a much improved performance a step forward he is fully expecting the team to make. I think it [this weekend] is important to us, similar to the Barcelona weekend where already before we said it was important to see our new developments are working and it s the same here, he told reporters in Istanbul on Thursday. As we all know there is no testing anymore, we have the wind tunnel data and sometimes have some straight-line testing data, but until we see lap times we cannot really be sure. It is important that we will see a step forward here, but actually I m quite confident that we will see an improvement as usual the question is how much the others have improved. But it s going to be a step forward for us and we are also working on other stuff that is already in the pipeline for the coming races. BMW blamed tyre problems for its alarming slump to the back of the field in Monaco and team boss Mario Theissen expressed confidence that the introduction of a two-step diffuser from Turkey would help it resume the progress it had started to make at Barcelona.Heidfeld shares his team boss s assessment of its form at the last race. I expect that Monaco was a one-off, Heidfeld said. It s not an excuse because it s not nice to struggle so much at Monaco, but still I believe it s not a representative circuit and we should be better here and I guess it will be a similar situation for Toyota. While the F1.09 will feature a redesigned rear end and other aero tweaks at Istanbul Park, Heidfeld confirmed KERS would not be returning until the next round at Silverstone at the earliest.BMW, which last used the device in Bahrain, has developed a revised system but Heidfeld says it has opted to spend this weekend soley focusing on the other upgrades. The decision has been made to run without the KERS here, he said. As in Barcelona, we will focus on the new aero package and then we will decide for the next coming races as usual if we will put it on or not. The German driver added that BMW could take heart from rival Ferrari s sudden resurgence in recent races, while its own Barcelona improvements proved it also has the capability to respond to a slump. Maybe encouraging is a good word but you need to do it yourself! he said. But I think in Barcelona we could see that we also did a step, I think Ferrari did the biggest step forward, but we clearly had a big improvement as well going for two points with seventh position which is not what originally targeted for but which was something that out of reach before Barcelona and we could do it. It is impressive to see how much they have come back.