The Battle between Ferrari and McLaren

After the test in Barcelona, things are being heated up in the race against time. Spanish Grand Prix takes place next weekend, and both Ferrari and McLaren have introduced some very important updates on their cars. Norbert Haug says this grand prix will decide who takes control on the championship for the rest of the year, and Kimi says the battle has only just begun. Lets have a look at the major reasons why:

"The media-pleasers at the Barcelona test this week were McLaren and
Honda’s wacky wings. But the real revolution roared out of the Ferrari
garage, according to the more astute members of the press; including
Germany’s Sport Bild.

The magazine quoted Toro Rosso chief Franz Tost as observing: "What Ferrari is testing is basically a new car."

Most obviously, the revised F2007 – strictly not a ‘b’-spec,
according to team sources – features a noticeably reshaped engine cover
and smaller sidepods.

The controversial under-body, meanwhile, has been totally redesigned to withstand the FIA’s new flexibility tests.

But it is the engine’s cooling system that is the newest, allowing
Maranello based engineers to run a more aggressive bodywork setup and
dominate the opening three days of the ultimately four day test.

"We are at least half a second faster than before," Felipe Massa stated.

Sport Bild estimates that Ferrari’s advantage over McLaren ahead of
the Spanish Grand Prix may have blown out to more than one second per
lap.

Italian magazine "Corriere dello Sport" says Ferrari is now 7 tenths quicker than Mclaren. They have analyzed
all lap times during Barcelona testing so they arrived to this
conclusion, however they call "disturbing" behaviour of Mclaren that
seemed looking at job of Ferrari instead of concentrating on their
program. The magazine thinks McLaren could use a "secret
weapon" during the next GP."

Could this be the secret weapon? > McLaren to take new wing to Spanish GP

We’ll find out soon enough. The track changes to Barcelona meant McLaren and Ferrari and most teams had to find out how their cars perform there and improve on that. We have no idea if this new wing of McLaren’s is simply for that or to beat Ferrari. Whereas Ferrari have made a number of improvements, including the side pods, the engine cover, little aero tweaks and most importantly > the handling of the car is much better for Kimi now.

Lets hope for an exciting battle between Ferrari and McLaren, but on a track where overtaking is almost impossible, you might aswell be prepared to face a dominating victory from either McLaren or Ferrari.

Who’ll be giving the thumbs up in a week from now? Hopefully it will be Kimi

During the test at Barcelona, a Kimi fan ‘pAtbr’ (from the Official KR Forum) manage to get a few pics of the man himself, Kimi!

You can check out more of her great pics here: kimi/forum/F1 testing