Brawn optimistic of no engine problems

The team's Malaysian Grand Prix was wrecked by a spate of piston issues that forced engine changes for both Michael Schumacher and Felipe Massa before the race.

After first practice in Australia the team said they were hopeful that the current engines would be good enough to last the race, despite technical director Ross Brawn claiming that the Italian manufacturer still have work to do in understanding the reason behind their piston failures.

"It's okay so far," said Brawn, who crossed his fingers when asked about how the engines were so far this weekend. "We are not stressing them quite so much as we would normally do, particularly for qualifying. We have just taken the RPM down a little bit.

"It is a frustrating problem because it is a problem with one piston in the engine and all the others are perfectly okay -  but you only need one to fail of course. So it is a difficult problem to resolve because when you take the engine apart, seven pistons are perfect and one of them looks a bit sad, but we have some modifications to try before Imola.

"When you are getting such an erratic failure then you can try several engines and they look okay, but you don't really know if you have fixed it because it is not every engine and it is not every piston."

Brawn added that the situation was even more frustrating for the team because the problem was not confined to the same piston.

"It is one of the eight, but unfortunately it is not in the same position, which is why it is frustrating because it doesn't seem to be linked to the geometry of the engine.

"We are doing some modifications and things that should help if you look at it in a conventional way, and we now need to get more experience with the modifications."

The uncertainty about the condition of specific engines meant that Ferrari had no choice but to change Schumacher's engine in Malaysia, even though subsequent post-race analysis proved it would have lasted the race distance.

"We were doing work back at the factory to see if we could understand the situation, and when we realised we still didn't have a full understanding then we had to change Michael's engine," said Brawn.

"If something had happened back at the factory that had helped us to understand the situation then we might have changed that decision, but it wasn't possible."