Yeah, I'll eat crow on this one. I said that Fisi would be leaps and bounds above Luca, maybe even help the Scuderia score some points. Fisi is just as bad as Luca was, but I don't think it is a reflection on the driver. The F60 is just a poor car. The media, who mercilessly bashed Luca, has seemingly cut Fisi some slack and instead turned their disdain towards the car.

Having seen Fisi struggle I do think Badoer did a better job than it seemed at the time.

Consider that Badoer hadn't raced in F1 or any other race for 10 years, Had never driven the F60, Had never driven a 2009 spec car & hadn't driven anything since last November, It was always going to be difficult for him to jump in, The F60 been a difficult car to drive just made things worse for him.

Had Badoer had to jump in last year I think he'd have done better & either scored points or been real close to scoring points.

I've heard how bad BADoer is, and how bad Fisi is, but did Fisi really become bad just since Spa? He almost wins a race, then becomes the worst driver in the field, over night? The guy has won races, driven for winning teams, and suddenly he's just awful? Something was awful, but I don't think it was Fisichella. What I think Fisi's struggles show, is just how bad the F60 was, and how maybe the performances that Kimi and Phil were able to coax out of it were more impressive than, say, someone else's trundling around mid-pack, staying a few places ahead of a rookie teammate?

Me too. That Ferrari appears to just plain suck.

TheBurner - 01 November 2009 12:52 PM

I've heard how bad BADoer is, and how bad Fisi is, but did Fisi really become bad just since Spa? He almost wins a race, then becomes the worst driver in the field, over night? The guy has won races, driven for winning teams, and suddenly he's just awful? Something was awful, but I don't think it was Fisichella. What I think Fisi's struggles show, is just how bad the F60 was, and how maybe the performances that Kimi and Phil were able to coax out of it were more impressive than, say, someone else's trundling around mid-pack, staying a few places ahead of a rookie teammate?

Ditto

How much better might they both have done had they BEEN ALLOWED TO TEST!!!!!

karlfevans - 01 November 2009 12:55 PM

Me too. That Ferrari appears to just plain suck.

Kinda like these boards, one fix after another, didn't fix it, just made it more of a complicated mess. Garbage in = Garbage out.

Fisi was at times a reasonably solid driver, never a Kimi. This year Kimi's heart didn't seem to be there. FA brings a MS sense of an engineer's feedback, drivers input and some serious passion thus some credible potential back to the Ferrari effort for 2010.

karlfevans - 01 November 2009 12:55 PM

Me too. That Ferrari appears to just plain suck.

I don't think Ferrari sucked that bad because when Kimi was scoring high points the other drivers were just average. I believe this is because of two things.

#1. Kimi and Massa are a couple of the top drivers in the series. Luca and Fisichella are not. I would say Fisichella is just "average" at best and proved it when he was with Renault and again with his time at Ferrari.

#2. Kimi and Massa developed the cars and were use to them. I hate the excuse that a driver can't get use to a car but I think that's exactly what happened to Fisichella.

brandspro - 01 November 2009 02:39 PM

How much better might they both have done had they BEEN ALLOWED TO TEST!!!!!

Yup.hands tied driving a car that wants to swap ends everytime you late brake it.

Proof that the Kimster is the MAN.

Fisi and Luca simply never got a chance to fix the cars they had to drive.

We had a post on another thread describing how much different it is to drive a KERS car - to have someone who is used to a certain sequence jump in cold and become confident without any testing is purely unfair.

It had nothing to do with Fisi being "average". It had to do with the way the car needs to driven uniquely and adapting to it.

btw an avg driver doesn't haul an inferior Force India car which gets lit up with the right aero out of nowhere to podium at Spa and beat his much younger teammate in the same car quite handily all weekend and then jump into a Ferrari and not even get out Q3.

I'd love to have seen Schumi jump into the F60 cold turkey and watched whether he could make it sing.


Today's result shows just how much of a dog it was in that despite a DNF from Hamilton and no points from Kovalainen, even Kimi couldn't bring it into the points from 11th to tie McLaren for 3rd place in the WCC.

I think Fisichella has the same sort of problems in the Ferrari that Heikki Kovalainen has in the McLaren. They just can't drive the cars the way they should be driven in the braking zones and turning into the corners.

There will be massive loss of time in the braking zones if the car does not feel right and is unstable and the driver lacks confidence in the car.

Heikki has been talking several times of locking the wheels being a problem. And of how he has had to change his driving style as to how he brakes and how he goes into the corners. His style has been to go into the corners at high-speed, but the current McLaren requires a different approach, it requires that the braking be done in a straight line - first you brake, then you stop braking, and only then you start turning into the corner. That is exactly the opposite to what Heikki has been doing before - he has gone to the corners at higher speeds and has dropped the speed during a longer distance.

In other words his style has been smooth, and this year he has had a car which requires a more angular driving style. He mentioned of this early in the season already, that he should do sharper turns - brake longer whilst in the straight, and that results in the line through the corner being a sharper turn.

Fisichella said telemetry shows he has 2nd gear on whilst Kimi still has 5th gear on when approaching a corner. He said he should first do all the braking, and then drop the gears. That's not what he has done all his career - he has dropped the gears whilst braking. Now the Ferrari car with the KERS does not work well if he does that.


We saw Luca Badoer drive very erratically in the braking zones - sometimes he was way off the optimal line going into the corner - he was like taking the inside line already in the straight when there was no other cars close to him. Looking at it in retrospect, perhaps that was a result of the car being unstable for him under braking. That can result in him going all over the place in the braking zones, resulting in taking very incorrect lines when going into the corners.


It's an unfortunate situation for all of these drivers that they faced a situation in which they would have to dramatically change their driving style. You can well ask how about their team-mates - did they have to change their style? To be honest I don't know much about this. Of Hamilton I recall reading that his braking style has been like the one that currently works well with the McLaren, but of Kimi, I have no idea if he had to change his driving style or not. Probably they all did have to change it, but by how much is they key question here. If your driving style was less smooth to begin with, then it was an easier transition. This I believe to be the case for Lewis at McLaren and for Kimi at Ferrari, when comparing them to Heikki and Fisichella.

The driving style they spent learning the most of their career - it's not going to be replaced with another by snapping your fingers.


I can imagine Luca Badoer feeling a little bit better now after having seen how Giancarlo Fisichella struggled as well in the Ferrari. Let's say, though, that Fisichella got much closer to Kimi's laptimes than Badoer did. There was a big difference - but in that I think the key was Badoer's lack of driving a modern F1 car and lack of racing during this century.

Putting Badoer in the car is in my opinion still a mistake from the management at Ferrari - they should have gone after someone like Fisichella already right away when they knew Massa can't race. They are Ferrari - they can get many drivers to change teams mid-season. So I address this mistake to the management at Ferrari and not to Badoer - he was put into an extremely difficult position by his team and it was brave from him to respond to the call. For that he should get our admiration.