Luca Badoer Finally Gets Ferrari Drive

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Originally Posted by Knock-on

I appreciate what you are saying Garry but the feedback from a driver is still important.

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Sure it is, and I suppose that Ferrari chose Badoer because they want him to develop the car not to race it, any point that he might land by chance will be a bonus.

The next year F1 Ferrari model has been tested in the wind tunnel for some time already and I think that Ferrari will start implementing ideas that others can't spot by just seeing the car (like weight distribution, which will be very important next season given that they will have to use fuel tanks twice as big as this season) and have Badoer test them.

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Originally Posted by Knock-on

I appreciate what you are saying Garry but the feedback from a driver is still important.

Cars designed purely in a test environment tend to be blindingly fast right up until the point where they have to turn a wheel on a track.

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This years Brawn car says differently. Drivers had done no testing with it, it was super fast from day one.
No matter how good a feedback the driver gives, if the engineers arent clever enough, nothing will happen.

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Originally Posted by ioan

Respect is earned not gifted in my world.

I also posted a link to a source that says he didn't and having closely followed the F60 tests since teh first day the car hit the track I'm sure the only drivers who drove it around a circuit are Felipe and Kimi, and the only other driver who drove it was Gene in a straight line test.

PS: Believe it or not I have good knowledge of Italian, beside other 5 languages that I speak fluently.

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I don't know which is correct but there does seem to be conflicting stories. Pino posted a normally reliable source and it was up for discussion, not as a weapon for attack ;)

If you wrote all responses in the same manner as this one, I don't think you would ever have a problem with anyone on this forum :up:

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Originally Posted by Garry Walker

This years Brawn car says differently. Drivers had done no testing with it, it was super fast from day one.
No matter how good a feedback the driver gives, if the engineers arent clever enough, nothing will happen.

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Rightly so, in the end it all boils down to the engineers.
One of the reasons that race drivers are used more to test is that nowadays the engineers have all the technology they need to know if a car is performing as planned or not, and the driver is needed in order to dial in the car to his personal liking not to make it faster than what the engineers predicted.

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Originally Posted by Garry Walker

This years Brawn car says differently. Drivers had done no testing with it, it was super fast from day one.
No matter how good a feedback the driver gives, if the engineers arent clever enough, nothing will happen.

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I agree 100%. If you don't have a good design team, you are just trying to polish a turd.

However, Brawn GP may be a new team in name but is a very established team going back a long way. They are hardly new kids on the block.

All I'm saying is that driver feedback is still important although as a componant of the whole package. One of the things about Schumacher was the way he could feedback exactly what he wanted to happen and mould a car around him.

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Originally Posted by ioan

Sure it is, and I suppose that Ferrari chose Badoer because they want him to develop the car not to race it, any point that he might land by chance will be a bonus.

The next year F1 Ferrari model has been tested in the wind tunnel for some time already and I think that Ferrari will start implementing ideas that others can't spot by just seeing the car (like weight distribution, which will be very important next season given that they will have to use fuel tanks twice as big as this season) and have Badoer test them.

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I agree that there must be an element of this IMHO. Luca is a very experienced test driver and hitting the 2010 season from the first race should be Ferrari's aim now.

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Originally Posted by Dzeidzei

All in all its frustrating, annoying, stupid and futile. And anyone talking to him -including myself- should only blame themselves. Whats really fukcing annoying is that he makes this forum more and more like a Motorsport Ioan discussion forum.

Why not just ban the guy, is beyond me.

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The ignore function is a wonderful thing. (It would be even more wonderful if it worked on quoted text.)

For the benefit of anyone not aware of this feature: click User CP at the top left, then select buddy/ignore lists near the bottom of the left-hand menu.

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Originally Posted by AndyL

The ignore function is a wonderful thing. (It would be even more wonderful if it worked on quoted text.)

For the benefit of anyone not aware of this feature: click User CP at the top left, then select buddy/ignore lists near the bottom of the left-hand menu.

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To my experience this works on every day except those ending with an Y.

I think the bigger question is not if Badoer's driven the car or not, any driver worth his salt (which Luca definitely used to be...he didn't end up in F1 or at Ferrari by accident!) can adapt to a new car, especially a new version of a car he has already driven. I know there are significant differences in the rules from last year to this, but he can (as Schumacher did) bung slicks on the old model to make it a little closer than it used to be at least.

Rather the big question is whether he will be physically and mentally fit enough to cope with the demands of a GP weekend, where he will be compared against Kimi Räikönnen and be filling the shoes of messieurs Massa and Schumacher effectively! Could there be a more pressured seat to sit in than that!!!

I'm expecting him to push too hard in Qually, have an off and compromise his weekend...but if he can get some good laps in on Friday and adjust well (as I expect he will) then it's just a matter of keeping his cool. That Ferrari is now good enough to score points, and I think Luca may just do that at some point this season, but not at Valencia where I don't think he's ever driven at...

I'm expecting Luca to be knocked out in Q2. The current format is very different from the 12 laps, hour long session of old, and all of the 'old boys' (DC, Wurz et all) struggled to adapt to this new pressure pot of a qualifying.

He'll come into his own in the race - with the right stratagy he'll be metronomic and pound round to hopefully score his first points.