Maurizio Arrivabene on the SF70-H, the team and the changes for 2018

Quotes from Maurizio Arrivabene at Scuderia Ferrari’s Christmas press lunch

The SF70-H
Maurizio Arrivabene: “We understood that we had a good car during the winter testing at Barcelona. Our doubts were about Mercedes and how their car would have been in Australia, because we thought that Mercedes hadn’t brought all the developments during winter testing, keeping something hidden for the first race. At the Australian Grand Prix we had the first the first real challenge/comparison, and it was clear that we had a good car.”

The team
Maurizio Arrivabene: “People spoke a lot about the difficult time we had during the Asian races, but also Baku had an important influence in negative terms. After that obstacle, all went well until Hungary. In that moment we had the certainty of being able to fight to win the title: if you remember, Sebastian drove the car to the end with the steering wheel inclined by 30 degrees, but the team worked with an incredible coldness, also there was Kimi who defended Seb from the attacks of Hamilton. At the Hungaroring it was clear how the team had grown up, that was deter-mined and conscious of its own resources”.

Changes within the team
Maurizio Arrivabene: “What surprises me is that when there are changes within the team, there are immediately big headlines because people are not used to consider us as a company. It’s important, because Ferrari is a company which has enough resources and people to make changes within the team: there are people who work in the GT department and, doing their job very well, can join the Scuderia. Here there are people and resources.”

The show
Maurizio Arrivabene: “On this topic there would be some questions to make, starting from how circuits were designed. Take Abu Dhabi and ask the drivers: according to them, Yas Marina is one of the most boring circuits. You can understand since the first day of free practice that these are the kind of circuits that will offer less show, regardless of the type of cars. In the end, the circuits that offered us the biggest show were the historical ones. A proposal to improve the show in a short time might be to modify the use of DRS. If drivers had not to wait a full lap or only some parts of the track to use it, maybe they could show their talent and their courage and the show would improve. Before thinking about grid girls there are more important topics… Last week a presentation of Liberty Media’s future programs was made to all the teams and also to commercial/communication managers. They did a sort of summary of the season from their point of view. Let’s say that we can give a six to their first season. Liberty Media want to adopt a model that is used in NBA/NFL, but let’s not forget that the leagues are owned by the teams It’s also about the definition of small teams: people talk about costs out of the world regarding the supply of the engines, but nobody talks about costs for research and development of the PU for companies like Ferrari/Mercedes/Honda/Renault”.