F1 - Ferrari: Questions still unanswered.

Rory Phoulorie · Zorce Jedi Knight Joined: 26 Jan 2007 Posts: 1698

Despite heading the times on the opening day of the Australian Grand Prix, Ferrari insists that the relative performance of all eleven teams in the field remains unclear.

Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen confirmed recent testing form by putting the two F2007 machines into first and second places respectively across the two 90-minute sessions, but new technical chief Luca Baldisserri claimed that there was still much to learn, both about its own performance and where it stood relative to its rivals.

"All in all, we can look to tomorrow's qualifying with reasonable confidence, while aware of all the questions that are still unanswered after free practice," he said, "We are reasonably satisfied with the work we have done today, when the sessions were characterised by quite changeable weather conditions. We concentrated on tyre comparison, both in terms of performance over a single lap and on longer runs. Felipe was able to complete his planned programme, but Kimi was held up by the interruption halfway through the second session.

"All the same, we picked up a lot of data that will be useful for the rest of the weekend. The F2007 cars ran trouble free and seem well balanced."

Massa played the role of chief pursuer to reigning world champion Fernando Alonso in the opening session, which began wet but dried sufficiently for tentative slick-shod laps to be completed in the last ten minutes. Raikkonen, however, could not get a clear lap at the right time and languished down in 19th spot. Although he picked up to take second spot after lunch, the Finn reckoned that there was more to come from his car.

"We worked mainly on comparing the two types of tyre that we have, but I was a bit unlucky with the traffic and the red flag, which affected our programme," he insisted, "However, the car seems to be well balanced at this track and we managed to pick up a good baseline of data to analyse today for qualifying and for the race."

Massa, meanwhile, echoed the general mood of optimism, but remained guarded about his chances for the rest of the weekend.

"It was a good day," the Brazilian reported, "We did a good job of comparing the two types of dry weather tyre and, this morning, we also got the opportunity to run in the wet, which led us to see that the balance of the F2007 is pretty good.

"This was a positive start to the weekend but, of course, what counts is tomorrow's qualifying and, most of all, Sunday's race."

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