More from behind the scenes at Ferrari

The Ferrari team got down to business today, ironing out some glitches in the new car.

The Ferrari team got down to business today, ironing out some glitches in the new car. I'm told that a part fell off the car on its first exploratory lap yesterday. But the KERS system worked and in the end the car did 100kms, which is less than they had hoped for, but pretty good nevertheless from a complex new car.

Ferrari's idea in bringing the car out so early is to have plenty of time for debugging. Reliability was not perfect last season and they are painfully aware that there is only a limited amount of testing before the season and none at all once the racing starts on March 29th, so the next few weeks are critical.

This will hurt Red Bull, for example who don't launch until February. The winning team this year will be the one which can debug its car enough to find reliability and then develop it using only the simulation tools at the factory and the Friday test days at Grands Prix. It's a totally different way of working for the teams, especially Ferrari who invested heavily in test facilities. It makes you realise how much they have been prepared to give up as part of their commitment to FOTA.

There is a lovely story in Gazetta dello Sport from the Ferrari launch, which indicates the human dynamics among the drivers; apparently Michael Schumacher had lunch at the Mugello test track with Felipe Massa, his manager Nicolas Todt, and test drivers Luca Badoer and Marc Gene. At the time, Kimi Raikkonen was asleep in a Lancia in the car park!

Apparently the car is a subtly different colour (they call it Rosso Perlato) and this is because the paint saves 1kg in weight. Another thing which was said at the launch to the Italian contingent, but didn't necessarily come out in the English part of the proceedings was Stefano Domenicali's point that the new engine agreement says that teams must use no more than 8 engines per driver in a season. How they use them is their business. You do not have to use the same engine for three races in a row, for example, you can save them. So you could avoid using the same engine for Spa and Monza, both really tough tracks on engines. Also crucially, you can change engines after qualifying with no penalty this year. The trouble comes when you need a ninth engine...

Schumacher didn't rule out driving the car at some point, and Domenicali said that his experience of slick tyres could be useful as neither Massa nor Raikkonen has driven an F1 car on slicks. But his opportunities to test will be limited and voices behind the scenes say that Schumacher's role will be less hands-on this year.

Another point I found noteworthy was engine guru Gilles Simon's observation that the change of rev limit from 19,000 to 18,000rpm has cost 25 horsepower. Meanwhile chief designer Nicolas Tombazis, whom McLaren allowed to leave a few years back, observed that the car would look completely different by the start of the new season at the end of March. The development race has already started.