SAME MONTH, SAME DAY…
Last December, talking to the press about Ferrari’s ambitious projects for the new Formula One season, Sergio Marchionne, Ferrari’s Chairman and CEO, said that the new supercar, specifically created for the 2018 Championship “will try to settle the score with the Mercedes”.
Mercedes reacted in a fair play manner, congratulating its Italian rival but also congratulating Alfa Romeo – another Italian car manufacturer, known worldwide for its sports cars and for having been involved in car racing since the beginning of the 20th Century – for returning, along with Sauber, to Formula One.
Torger Christian Wolff, Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team’s executive director, said:
“What Sergio Marchionne and Maurizio Arrivabene are doing is certainly very clever. The have created a strong relationship with Haas (for example, in the Automotive Aerodynamics Simulation field) which has helped the whole Ferrari team and the company. What they are currently creating with Sauber is certainly forward-thinking.”
Sincere compliments but also eagerness to shine and win. Behind the polite façade, everyone dreams about victory and enthusiastically work to grab it.
And the two companies have already started to race off the road! Both of them will, in fact, present their new F1 car on the same month, February, and on the same day, on Thursday 22!
McLaren, for its part, announced that the company will unveil its 2018 F1 new supercar, the day after, on 23 February.
TWO WINNING SUPER CARS FOR 2018
Mercedes’ 2018 challenger is the W09, the successor of the already successful W08. To beat it – Mercedes has been the F1 world champion over the last four years – Ferrari has created a new, powerful single-seater, which will be unveiled, with an official on-line presentation, four days before the pre-season testing in Barcelona.
However, the new vehicle, known within the company as the “669”, already successfully passed significant tests at the FIA-approved CSI facility at Bollate, near Milan, such as, for example, the FIA frontal crash tests as well as the pivotal static tests.
