Schuey on Ferrari's testing plans

Despite Ferrari team boss Stefano Domenicali's suggestion last month that Michael Schumacher's experience with slick tyres could be very useful to the team as they prepare their challenge for 2009, I see that Michael Schumacher said recently that he will not be driving the new F60.

Schumacher, who turned 40 last month, has been a consultant to Ferrari ever since his retirement as a driver in 2006. He has driven as a super-tester on several occasions since then, but with restrictions on testing so severe now, he has decided that the work should be left to the race drivers.

Schuey, who has yet to define his role with the team for 2009, told the Koln Express, the local paper of Cologne, near his home town "The winter tests are very important. Especially given the ban during the season. It's a preparation for the whole season. As I see it, it's up to the race drivers to do the work, not testers. I'm speaking to Ferrari at the moment to see whether they see it the same way."

It's amazing to think just how different this situation is from when Michael was driving. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he spent over 200 days away from home in a year, with promotional activities, races and tests. The testing element of it was huge, often up to 20 days before the start of the season, and then two or three days in every week following a Grand Prix.

Ferrari committed a lot to testing because they had a special budget from Bridgestone, rumoured to be around £20 million per season, to carry out tyre development tests. Of course they would test all manner of new things on the car at the same time. It was quite a big advantage to have budget, two test tracks (Fiorano and Mugello) and unlimited test days.

It's one of the reasons McLaren invested so heavily in simulation technology in the early 2000s, because they did not have the same luxury with testing as Ferrari. Now that investment is paying off massively as they are miles ahead and it's Ferrari who are playing catch up in that area.

Michael always loved being in the car and driving, he had done it all through his childhood in karts, driving pretty much every day after school on the Kerpen track managed by his Dad and now owned by the family. He was lucky that he was around at a time when he could drive the car so much. Now it's very different. Imagine being Sebastien Buemi, the only rookie this season. When Jacques Villenueve was a rookie in 1996 he did something like 20,000 miles of testing before his first race. I remember talking to him at a test a few weeks before the first race and he felt like he'd already done a season! Buemi is right in at the deep end.

You can see from the above that Ferrari's agreement with FOTA to cut right back on testing is a huge cultural change and it shows how committed they are to making the organisation work. It was interesting to hear this week that the teams are now thinking they might have made a mistake banning all tests during the season, as they need a bit more time to get the new cars and particularly the KERS systems, reliable. The test team managers have been discussing going back to FOTA and suggesting two or three early season tests.

The FIA would have to agree to this because it was voted through by the world council in December. Max Mosley said yesterday that he would listen to their case, if the teams came to him, but he felt that he would 'probably not' agree to it.

So every day counts as the clock ticks down to Melbourne. Ferrari is in Bahrain this week testing. Most of the top drivers will only have seven days or so to get used to their new cars before the first race. That seems a bit extreme to me, but we'll see how they get on.

Incidentally, one thing I'm told about KERS is that if the system fails it will not cause the car to break down. That's certainly true of the Williams system and I'm pretty sure it's the case for all of them. So even if they have problems with it, it's not going to cause loads of cars to retire in the first few races.

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