Ferrari reshuffle to focus exclusively on quality control

Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne had said immediately after the Sepang trouble that the outfit needed to make some urgent revisions to prevent a repeat.

That prompted talk of a senior management overhaul, with some rumours even suggesting that team principal Maurizio Arrivabene's place could be under threat at the end of the season.

Ferrari technical director Mattia Binotto has clarified, however, that the revisions to the team are simply aimed at lifting parts quality to ensure that what happened in Malaysia cannot happen again.

"I think that to improve your performance you need to improve your car and your package, but you also need to improve your organisation," he said at the Japanese Grand Prix.

"What we are considering is something that was already planned: it is to reinforce our quality [control] department. It is as simple as that.

"Our quality department is already somehow reinforced and that is the change of organisation that our chairman was meaning."

Chasing answers

Although Ferrari's reshuffle is focused on quality control, Binotto has said that the team does not yet have a firm answer for the identical failures that struck Vettel and Raikkonen at Sepang.

"It is true that the problems we had were completely unexpected," he added. "It is a problem we didn't experience either on the dyno or the race track during the entire season.

"There were some quality issues with the parts – we failed an inlet manifold on the engine from the compressor to the cylinder heads. And it happened twice, because we had the same problem with Sebastian in qualifying and Kimi in the race.

"Obviously it happened twice in Malaysia, so certainly it could be some boundary conditions that affected the overall reliability in these occasions.

"It is something that we are analysing, and in parallel we reinforced the components, but it is something still we need to better understand."