Badoer Encouraged with F2005

Ferrari tester Luca Badoer has spoken glowingly about the team's new car, the F2005, on the last day of testing in Jerez, stating that the new car is better than the one raced in Melbourne.

Badoer, in his second day at the Spanish track after limited running in Italy, looked very pleased with himself at the end of the day, as did his engineers.

"Sincerely it's a really beautiful machine," he told Autosport-Atlas at the conclusion of the test, "but we will only know how good it is when we race.

"We had tested so far in Italy only, and now we are here to find out the true potential of the car. We don't know yet, but the new machine is better than the M car - we are going to find out next week how much better. We haven't done the true performance testing yet."

Badoer was limited in the amount of time he could spend in the car today - early rain put a stop to plans to run all day, with the Italian not running on track until around 14.00 local time. The car ran for 32 laps, eventually stopped by a small mechanical problem which the team claimed was not serious.

When asked how the new car felt to drive in comparison to the F2004M, Badoer noted: "In driving there is not much difference. It is important how well it works with the tyres, and we are going to find out more next week [at the performance test].

"It looks good, and this machine seems to be more consistent with the tyres than the M car, but obviously we have to find out more in a different temperature."

The F2005 has had few outings so far - Badoer has run it for 1,100 kilometres, with occasional tester Andrea Bertolini having done a further 500, although neither of the race drivers or Marc Gene have run the car at all to date.

Badoer insists the car has run flawlessly so far, the mechanical problem of this afternoon notwithstanding.

Following on from Ross Brawn's comments of a possible Bahrain debut, Badoer added: "At the moment it is not possible to say when [it will race] - obviously because it is so good we want to bring it in as early as possible, but to bring it in and have it break is no good, so we have to see."

Hisao Suganuma, technical boss of Bridgestone, is certainly keen to see the F2005 race, at the end of the day he raved about the new car, noting: "It looks good from what we have seen yesterday - the [tyre] degradation is so much better than with the M car.

"Luca is not pushing at the moment, but the times look good. As soon as it's ready we'd like to have it race."

Ferrari will run the F2005 for four days at the Mugello circuit during the Malaysian Grand Prix.