Ferrari's Pat Fry says team in 'reasonable' form after day two of F1 testing

As the Maranello-based team continues to make progress on its radical F2012, Fry says there remain plenty of issues that need to be solved in the final two days of testing.

When asked by AUTOSPORT about what position he felt the team was in now as pre-season testing nears it conclusion, he said: "Reasonable shape I suppose. You are always going to be happy when you are sitting there half a second a lap quicker than everyone knowing that you have still got 60 kilos of fuel in the car. I think we have got a lot of work to do. We just need to keep on.

"New bits are coming through, and we have to sort out exactly what we have got and understand how to deal with the car balance. And then it is a case of trying to get the last few developments that are coming on to the car. There are another four reasonable development items coming through before Sunday."

Fry said he was not too worried about the form that Fernando Alonso showed over a race distance simulation that was conducted on Friday afternoon, even though it did not appear as competitive as that done by Romain Grosjean in the Lotus at the same time.

"I haven't had time to go through the other long runs and overlay it to the others yet, but we were trying a mixture of new and scrubbed sets, with various mileages on," he said. "Some show quite bad degradation and some were quite reasonable."

Fry did admit, however, that one of the problems the team is facing is that the car tends to have a narrow performance window - where its form fluctuates dramatically as conditions change.

"We drop in and out of having a good balance or not, and that is something we are working on trying to understand still. Yesterday there were times when the car was good and times when it suddenly changed, and that is what we are trying to understand."

Ferrari evaluated a new front wing on Friday, which was not used for its race simulation run, and Fry said that more experiments were expected on its exhaust configuration, with the team having moved away from a more aggressive concept used at the last Barcelona test.

"It showed some good promise but after the test we did here last week, it was clear that we needed to do a lot more development before we race it, so it is something that we will carry on working on and look at later.

"Now obviously, having developed that car for that concept, we are looking to try and re-optimise everything for the week and a half we have got. There is not a massive difference between the two but we need to go through and check all the details - there are more bits turning up tonight and some other bits for Sunday to try and do the final optimisation."