Ferrari Chairman pans backmarker teams
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| Luca de Montezemolo loves to hear himself talk |
(GMM) Luca di Montezemolo has continued his sustained attack on formula one's new teams.
The Ferrari president thinks the grid should be filled by the bigger teams fielding three cars, rather than by opening the doors to newcomers including Lotus, Virgin and HRT.
Next year, another small team is likely to make its debut.
Spain's El Mundo newspaper this week claims that the budget of the new Spanish outfit HRT is ten times smaller than Ferrari's.
"In modern F1 races cars with GP2 levels of performance shouldn't be allowed to participate — they are supposed to race on Sunday mornings," Montezemolo is quoted by Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport.
Montezemolo argues that Fernando Alonso's push for Montreal victory was ruined by the lapping of backmarkers, an apparent reference to his delays behind Jarno Trulli's Lotus and the HRT of Karun Chandhok.
But while it is true that, earlier this year, the small teams were vastly off the pace, all of the six cars were faster by multiple seconds than the entire GP2 field in Turkey recently.
And in Canada last weekend, Heikki Kovalainen's Lotus qualified just two tenths behind the Ferrari-powered Sauber of Kamui Kobayashi, while Virgin and HRT runners were also easily within 107 per cent of the pole time.
The new teams' lap time deficit in Canada was between 3 and 4 seconds, compared with Giancarlo Fisichella's 2.2 second qualifying deficit in a Ferrari-powered Force India at the same circuit two years ago.
A report at Italiaracing said: "It should be noted that the only complaints this season about the smaller teams have come from Ferrari."
06/17/10 Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo has once again condemned Formula 1's new teams, claiming that the cars in question are both too slow for the sport and can negatively affect the race at the front of the field.
The claims follow Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix, in which Fernando Alonso lost both first and second places to the McLaren drivers after being held up in separate Turn 7 incidents involving the Lotus of Jarno Trulli and Hispania of Karun Chandhok.
Cars which perform at GP2 levels shouldn't be allowed to take part in Formula 1 races – they usually race on the Sunday mornings," Italian di Montezemolo is quoted as saying by Gazetta dello Sport, adding that Ferrari's raw pace was strong enough for victory on the semi-street Montreal circuit.
"Let us just hope that, in the future, we won't see lapped cars causing us a disadvantage – because we've had enough of that already," he summed up.