Scuderia Ferrari confirmed last July that it had completed work on a new state-of-the-art simulator facility at Fiorano after two years of work, developed by the British company Dynisma. The Maranello team explained at that stage that it intended to have it up and running for the last races of the 2021 Formula 1 championship, but most importantly using it for the important development of its 2022 project, as the new technical regulations come into force from next year.
While the simulator was first used three months ago, the Italian side has spent the last few weeks working with its drivers to calibrate it and get it up to speed. It was first used for race support over the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend. Interviewed by select media during the last race weekend of the current season, Scuderia Ferrari sporting director Laurent Mekies explained that the aim was to have it fully up and running in the early part of 2022:
“We started using it with drivers in it in September, but it takes one month, two months, three months to actually get to validate it. I think Mattia said we used it for the race support last weekend for the first time. It doesn’t mean that the correlation has finished. It’s part of the cycle to actually have that data point that is a very specific data point. But really, is it working at full speed? No. When is that going to be? Probably in the early months of next year. So that’s the one we are using, that’s the one we are working on. Is it already at full potential? No not at at all.” – Laurent Mekies said, as reported by the Italian media.
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The new simulator has full driver in-the-loop capabilities, as used by a number of other teams. Antonio Fuoco and Davide Rigon are Ferrari’s two main Formula 1 simulator drivers. The Maranello team is continuing to use its previous simulator to help with the transition process to the new facility, that Laurent Mekies confirmed represented a “big step” and had only been seen by an “extremely limited” number of people within the Italian side:
“From a resource perspective, you don’t want to stay in that transition phase for too long .It’s also why you see us switching to the new one for the race support, even though we are not 100% yet, because it’s energy consuming to go from one to the other. But yes, for transition, it has to be a time of [using] them together.” – Scuderia Ferrari sporting director Laurent Mekies concluded.
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