Ferrari: Windtunnel issues hurting title bid

As reported this week, Ferrari plans to shut down its windtunnel to make checks following issues with correlation.

Domenicali reckons Ferrari's current windtunnel is outdated, which is why he feels the updates to its car do not work as expected based on tunnel data.

"I think our structure is not the best one in that respect," said Domenicali on Friday at Suzuka. "It's quite old. We are trying to improve the quality of the tools we have, this is something we are trying to do, so we try and improve correlation and this is the plan that we should be able to do for next season."

Although Ferrari uses other windtunnels too, Domenicali feels closing down the team's unit to improve it is the way to go.

"We are using other facilities and in the next couple of weeks we will define programme to be more specific on that, to see what is best time to shut down and improve things that are not at the maximum level at the moment," he said.

He added: "I am sure it happened also to other teams but I have seen in the second part of the season when trying to bring new updates to the car that not all the updates are working on track. So we started to investigate it more and we found this issue.

"We considered it was coming from the tool that is not really up to the speed of the new technologies in the market. That is why we think we need to improve that, so that the percentage [improvement rate] of what we bring to the track is higher than we have now.

"I think the situation with the championship is clear: if you are not able to improve the car then it is more difficult to fight for the championship as we cannot rely on the problems of the others.

"We cannot rely only being third or fourth, we need to make sure we can win a race and then we see what is the situation with the others."