Ferrari: engine problems behind us

The Maranello outfit have worked hard in the three-week break since the Australian Grand Prix to get on top of the engine issues that resulted in reliability concerns for the first three events of the season.

As well as suffering from the need to change engines in the Malaysian Grand Prix, Ferrari also had to compromise their performance by running restricted revs in Australia because of worries about further piston breakages.

But after modifications made to the pistons in time for this weekend's San Marino Grand Prix, Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn said he was hopeful that the issue was now behind them.

"I hope so," he said. "All the signs are good. The only slight doubt is that it appeared with no warning and the engines had been running well up to then and we just suddenly had a problem at Bahrain.

"It was a problem that appeared quite quickly, having done a lot of successful mileage over the winter.

"The piston design has been modified to a stronger design. There are a few little disadvantages but not from a reliability point of view. So we are all reasonably confident.

"We've done plenty of long runs on the specification, so we're as confident as we can be."

Brawn confirmed that the engine issue was restricted to pistons and did not revolve around any other area of their V8 power-unit.

"It was a piston problem - that was the component that failed," he said. "It was a frustrating problem because it was an individual piston that was having a problem while the other seven were okay.

"Normally when you get a piston problem, you get the evidence of the other pistons to look at and understand what on earth is happening. In this case we were getting a single piston failure with no evidence from the other seven as to what might be the problem. "

Brawn claimed that Ferrari's confidence about their engine would allow them to run at maximum revs for qualifying - something they had not been able to do since the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix when they locked out the front row of the grid.

"We couldn't use the revs in qualifying that we had been able to use in Bahrain," he said. "We are back to a situation where we can use a range of rpm on the engine whereas we had to be conservative in the last two.

"Fortunately we're back in a situation where I feel we can be quite aggressive in our approach, in a way we have been doing for several years with a strategy that's absolutely the best for being at the front of the grid."