Brawn GP is leaving no stone unturned as it seeks answers to the tyre temperature problems that have interrupted its once seemingly unstoppable march to the world championship.
Since his remarkable run of six victories from the season's first seven grands prix, Jenson Button has finished sixth, fifth and seventh in the three most recent races, with Red Bull Racing dominating at Silverstone and the Nurburgring and McLaren claiming its first win of 2009 at the Hungaroring.
Brawn has blamed its slump in form on an inability to get heat into the BGP 001's tyres, which was most evident in the cool-climate British and German GPs where the drivers had to weave around on the straights in order to generate temperature.
While he acknowledges that Red Bull and McLaren have raised their game, Ross Brawn feels his team has actually gone backwards and must urgently get to the bottom of its loss of performance.
"It's true that the opposition has got a lot stronger, but in the first part of the season we were getting the most out of the tyres and unexpectedly we've had problems there [since]," the team principal told Gazzetta dello Sport.
Brawn believes the fact that the temperature-related performance swings were much less marked in the early races suggests a specific cause related to a development item introduced on the car.
"It's certainly related to some modification which we've introduced during the year and so we are analysing exactly every step we've taken to understand what has caused this problem," he said.
He admits to some frustration that the ban on in-season testing has restricted the team's opportunities to pinpoint the problem and thus find a solution.
"I certainly would be more comfortable if we had been able to do some testing," he said.
"But this is a challenge which the regulations impose this year."
SOURCE: ITV-F1
Log in to comment