Minardi Report

THE TRUTH WILL BE DISCOVERED IN MELBOURNE-

With the 4-day-test session at Barcelona, the pre-season practice stage came to an end. Now, all eyes are on Melbourne circuit, where the first F1 GP will be held. This year, all F1 races will be broadcasted by SKY and RAI and they will be live or pre-recorded. We’ll finally see all cars showing their newest changes.

Once again every squad played hide and seek with rivals, to prevent them to take advantage of new amendments on car development and see their real potential.

“Even the third session of winter testing came to an end. It was so hard, almost impossible to understand something during this four-day-session, as teams were so good at hiding car changes. I had the impression that they tested the modified cars separately, so, only in Melbourne we’ll have the opportunity to see the real changes.

I think tyres will be the protagonists of the first races, as they’re so difficult to manage. In ten days, in Australia, we’ll see cars racing on medium and super soft tyres, which caused many problems to teams and drivers during the last session. In Malaysia, drivers will race on hard and soft. So, in the first two racing weekends we’ll get an overall view of the new Pirelli compounds”, says Gian Carlo Minardi.

“I think Red Bull played hide and seek again; the Austrian team set an interesting time only once, before being on 1-1.5 sec. behind the team on top. If this is true, teams will have to be seriously concerned. 8 cars crossed the line within 1 second; they can even grow up to 16 in qualifying. In Q3 we’ll see an interesting struggle between Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes (which is so lively on a single qualifying lap); Lotus and Williams could join in the struggle as outsiders. The competition level is higher than one year ago, as shown by times, which are so close to the 2012 pole, or even faster.”

“It seems that Ferrari found a good reliability; I’m so pleased to hear Pat Fry and the Ferrari staff saying that they’ve finally found a good match between the wind tunnel testing (virtual reality) and on- track testing(reality). This is so important, especially for a team which has always considered development as its flagship.”