Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo pushes for customer car idea – Formula 1 news
Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo says that the customer car idea would help with the development and progress of young Italian drivers.
Ferrari have been on this subject before and this is another attempt to promote this idea further. Montezemolo has always been an advocate of a third car induction in the sport and he told Gazzetta dello Sport of how it would be ideal to promote Italian
presence in the sport.
He said, “The real problem is that there's no opportunity for young drivers. Let's say I come up with three super strong Italians coming from minor formulas. What is next? I can't have them testing with the F1 car because testing is banned. Make them race
with the 458 GT is a different job.”
“I have an idea: giving a minor team a Ferrari from the previous year and forcing them to field a young Italian. That would be fantastic,” he added.
Montezemolo also explained the need to have more testing days. The team quit Formula One Teams’ Association in late 2011 over various issues which included the limited number of testing days. Ferrari is not the only team to advocate more testing days as
Red Bull, Toro Rosso, McLaren and Sauber all quit FOTA over more or less similar issues with the association.
The three pre-season testing held for the 2012 season only fuel the debate as Ferrari was left in disarray after their new car F2012 suffered technical difficulties throughout.
“Ferrari has a car that needs to be further assessed, discovered and driven,” he explained. “Tests are few and public, unfortunately. I'd wait a bit before coming to conclusions with such a long season ahead.”
Martin Whitmarsh though did not agree with Montezemolo’s customer car idea and said that different teams in the sport construct and manufacture their car and that is what makes F1 unique and interesting from other sports.
Montezemolo added that maybe someday because of the financial constraints that the sport has, the idea may materialise and teams would be allowed to run customer cars.
Montezemolo though at the end did concede that the idea may be philosophically not the right thing to do.
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