The first race of the season in Melbourne was a disaster for Ferrari as neither Kimi Raikkonen nor Felipe Massa were able to finish the race, due to engine problems. The Italian team seems to be facing serious reliability problems, and they are working hard to find the solution to it. The Ferrari engines were send back to Maranello to be examined by the team's engineers, in order to understand the reason why both engines failed during the race.
"We think we have an idea where the problem may lie. But the engines concerned have been flown back to Italy where they will be examined in detail by our engineers. Only when we have completed that process will we be able to diagnose the problem with any certainty. Freshly prepared replacement engines will be flown out to Malaysia in time for next Sunday's race when we hope that things will go rather better," a Ferrari spokesman told the Guardian.
Ferrari's driver Kimi Raikkonen though is not worried about this problem, as he is confident that a solution will be found soon. "The lack of reliability is a real problem for me now, but I know that back in Maranello the team is working hard to solve our problems. I'm not worried at all about the performance and the competitiveness of the car. The first race was like it was, but we know that we have a really good car. We have to be constantly competitive during the weekend, because when you have to start from far behind, you get stuck in the traffic, just the way it happened at Melbourne. We had a good start, but it is difficult to overtake; you need to take some risks, especially when you have slower cars in front of you. There's really not much to say about the first race weekend of the season: The only positive thing is, that it's all behind us. We had problems right from Saturday morning and we could not operate according to our plans. Obviously we are really disappointed. There's no point in knowing what we could have done on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, because in the end we would not have finished the race. We don't cry over spilled milk. It doesn't help anyway and would not change the result. Although, with all the problems we had, we still managed to get one point. So in the end one can always find a positive aspect in this Australian weekend. We'll see how important that single point will be by the end of the season," Raikkonen told the Autosport.
