The 2010 Ferrari F10 – A Mixed Bag?

Rumors out of Ferrari land are not good for fans of the team. It seems the new F10 is not meeting the expected performance criteria. Then again, the initial testing in Valencia finds the team at the top of the sheets.

2009 was a brutal year for the Scuderia. The car was a dog. Kimi was so unimpressive that he is now in  rally racing. Massa was nearly decapitated. All and all, it was pretty ugly but the team promised a better future. That future was based on the idea that it would spend much of the 2009 season getting ready for 2010. This was the strategy, after all, that had turned a laughably bad Honda team into the might Brawn outfit that took both titles.

The 2010 Ferrari is the F10. If looks count for anything, it isn’t easy on the eyes. The car is exceedingly long, but this is an attribute of all the cars this year given the need for bigger fuel tanks. The car also has a paint job that is lacking. These issues are, of course, completely irrelevant compared to whether the car will fly or not. Nobody knows but the team.

The scary thing is rumors are flying that Ferrari is so disappointed with the car that the team is already building a “B” spec to replace it. The issue may be the much hated diffuser issue again. The F10 appears to have what looks like a triple diffuser. This would represent a radical departure from the care of 2009.

Then there is some thought this may all be a smokescreen of sorts. The first tests of the season are underway at Valencia. No car is blowing the field away like Brawn did last year, but Ferrari has topped the charts ever session as of the writing of this post. Again, the advantages haven’t been huge and who knows which teams are really pushing and which ones are just doing laps to work on technical issues.

At this point, Ferrari looks like a mixed bag. Neither of the drivers seem particularly worried, so it can be presumed there isn’t a major problem. If there is, you can count on Ferrari pulling out all the stops to improve the car now that they have so much invested in Fernando Alonso.

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