Rob Smedley, a former Ferrari race engineer, feels that the April break in the Formula 1 calendar could give the Maranello team an important advantage at the upcoming Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which takes place this weekend at the Baku City circuit.
Due to the cancellation of the Shanghai Grand Prix, there has been a four-week gap between the races in Melbourne and Baku, which is taking place this weekend. This has allowed teams to thoroughly analyze the data from the first three races of the 2023 Formula One campaign, which were clearly dominated by the Red Bull RB19 cars. Scuderia Ferrari, who have only managed a best finish of fourth place with Carlos Sainz and faced several reliability problems, including the loss of both permitted Control Electronics components on Charles Leclerc’s SF-23 single-seater, could potentially benefit from the extended break.
Rob Smedley, who was previously the engineer for Felipe Massa during his time with the Italian side, has elaborated on how the one-month shutdown could aid the Maranello team.
“Let’s pick on Ferrari for a little bit,” Rob Smedley explained in a recent discussion for the latest episode of the F1 Nation podcast – “Ferrari have openly said they’re not optimising their car at the track during the race weekend, or they’ve had reliability struggles as well. This gives them a chance to get on top of that, not having this constant cycle of having to have half the brains in your organisation get on an aeroplane and execute a race. They’ve got to get their heads down and use their simulation tools, use everything that they’ve got available to try and understand it. Certainly you would hope that any little reliability issues that are holding the team back from going flat out, they’ll get around it. There’s no guarantees, but we could see some change in that order behind Red Bull.” – the British automotive engineer pointed out.
The former Ferrari race engineer, Smedley – who also worked with Felipe Massa at Williams after the Brazilian left the Italian side, provided more details about how the Formula 1 sides can get behind during a very busy schedule of events, as will be the case from now on until the August summer break:
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“I’ve been in this situation myself before, with so many races coming at you, when you’ve got little niggles like reliability problems, or you can’t quite understand how to optimise the car, you can never get ahead of it as you’ve got to just get prepped for the next race. And then there’ll be a new set of problems that come up with that and you’re either a week or two into the next one, so you never actually get ahead of it.” – the former Ferrari man added.
“For the more operationally based guys, if there’s any little reliability things, which we’ve seen with Ferrari at the start of the season, this gives them a chance to kind of breathe, to take stock, and to get ahead of those problems. So they can come out in Azerbaijan, let’s say with a more optimised and a more reliable package.” – Rob Smedley concluded.
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