New Ferrari ‘very different’ from ‘09 car

Date published : 28 Jan 2010 - 14:42:58

Ferrari design chief Nikolas Tombazis says the Maranello squad's latest car is fundamentally different from its unsuccessful 2009 challenger.Despite relatively stable technical regulations, Tombazis revealed at Ferrari's launch on Thursday that the F10 design is not an evolution of the F60 but a significant departure.He said the team's below-par 2009 campaign, and the need to fully exploit the potential of a double diffuser, made a complete overhaul necessary.For the new F10 we had to review the whole car, from the nose to the rear wing, for two main reasons: the substantial changes in some of the rules and because we had to recover an obvious performance deficit we had last year compared to our competitors, he said.We had to make the car longer to fit the bigger [fuel] tank, and we had to revise the car's front end because the tyres are different. And perhaps more importantly, we also had to revise the car's rear axle to exploit the double diffuser as much as possible.In order to free up space for a larger diffuser the F10 has a much more compact gearbox than its predecessor and revised rear suspension, although the chassis as a whole is longer to accommodate the larger fuel tank required this year now that refuelling is banned.Last year we weren't able to build a diffuser that was efficient enough, because the car hadn't been planned from the start for something like that, said Tombazis.And in fact the F2009's gearbox was too wide, so we weren't able to exploit the double diffuser as much as we would have liked to.This year we completely revised the gearbox and made it smaller, so there's more space for the diffuser, and we also worked on the rear suspension.Some of the internal parts of this narrower gearbox had to be redesigned; building an efficient, reliable and sufficiently rigid gearbox was an important task.So the area which is visually very different from last year's car is around the diffuser which, due to the mechanical work and [changes to] the gearbox and the suspension, is now bigger.Due to the work on the diffuser, we also had to review the flow to the rear wheels, where various appendages are different from those on the F2009.The larger fuel tank also required changes to the radiator layout and cooling system, while Tombazis said the outlawing of wheel fairings had forced the team to work hard to recoup the lost downforce.He suggested that only the rear wing was relatively unchanged from the 2009 car: I think that the rear wing was the most gradual evolution from last year's car.There are changes: the shape is definitely different, but this might not be visible.