Cool feature on the Ferrari F60 brake system

Little did I know Rob Smedley speaks pretty decent Italian. Better than mine. Then again when you're 'Phil' Massa's race engineer at Scuderia Ferrari I suppose it makes sense. Some Italian reporter caught up with him and asked some questions about the '09 car.



For those of you who understand even less Italian than I do, here's what I interpret as roughly what he's saying:

For a while he's going on about the seat, how they mold each one to each driver, et cetera. Then he gets into the steering wheel and describes some functions, but those are generally well-known. At 2:40 he gets to the cool part about in-cockpit brake adjustment.

The lever and the knob both make brake balance changes. The settings are something to the effect of baseline, and +/- 1% front balance. So for example if you have a really high speed braking zone with heaps of downforce and forward load transfer, you'd flick the lever forward to add some front balance. A couple corners later if you've got a low speed braking zone without as much load transfer, you can flick the lever back to get a little more bite on the rears. The nice aspect is you can quickly, easily, and repeatedly get to the same bias settings without having to constantly screw around with a knob. I'd suspect as little as 0.5-1% balance change is noticeable.. so being able to make repeatably adjustments is key.

The knob acts like you'd be used to in a racecar and makes a 'global' balance change, for example as fuel burns off or as the front or rear tires go away. So, let's say your lever positions are 54%, 53%, 52% to begin with, a twist of the knob might make them 55%, 54%, 53%... and another twist 56%, 55%, 54%.

How applicable is this in a F1000 chassis? Good question. May have to think about that, though initially I'd suspect it's probably not worth it. The top speeds and downforce are just not going to be the same. Doubt many F1000 drivers are braking at 5G.

Cool feature though.