Posted on Wednesday 19 March 2008
With Ferrari-McLaren relations at an all time low, paddock gossip is inevitably doing the rounds that Ferrari is now unhappier than ever about tackling this season and beyond with the new McLaren-developed control electronics. Following the investigation back at Maranello this week into Ferrari’s two failed race engines in Australia, speculation suggests that the Italian team has found that the design of the team’s V8 power plant itself was not responsible for the problems.
It is similarly being reported that Ferrari thinks the fuel pressure problem that stranded Kimi Raikkonen down the Melbourne grid last Saturday is also related to the McLaren ECU.
“This kind of thing can happen when you are working with one procedure that you do not know so well. Now we know that there is a conflict we can make sure it does not happen again,” a team spokesman told GP Week.
Team boss Stefano Domenicali, meanwhile, also suggested that Ferrari’s Albert Park dramas could be related to the new ECU, which is developed jointly by Woking based McLaren Electronic Systems and Microsoft, and awarded the tender to equip all F1 cars until 2010 by the FIA.
Domenicali said of the system: “We must still discover it in full.” (GMM)
I have thought this was a bad idea since I first heard about it. McLaren will be blamed for every failure and if they win the whole thing, there will be the assumption that they cheated. No wonder Microsoft wanted to get involved! That’s exactly the kind of situation they really like!
Whenever Ferrari doesn’t win its everyone’s fault but Ferrari’s, of course.
Although i agree that Ferrari likes to complain, i think this standard ECU built by McLaren is a bad idea. Whether you side with McLaren or Ferrari it doesn’t matter, but it certainly raises the possibility of unfair advantage
It is bizarre that all 6 cars with Ferrari engines seemed to have engine problems in Australia…