The Ferrari F1 team has downplayed proposition that last weekend's Malaysian GP tinted a main engine consistency problem. Alonso and Massa's engines had to be changed before the race in Bahrain, and Alonso then stop racing at Sepang last weekend with a foggy blown V8. Pedro de la Rosa and Kamui Kobayashi's Ferrari motorized Saubers also failed in the Malaysian warmth, even though their problems were not linked to Alonso's. The Ferrari has now set that the Sauber-spec engines failed due to "a malfunction of the electronic engine management". All electronic control units fitted to F1 cars are supplied by McLaren Electronic Systems (MES). The team also said Alonso's Sepang failure was sudden and inaccessible, and consequently not connected to the troubles in Bahrain that were caused "by a brief overheating".
Ferrari said Alonso's separate gearbox trouble in Malaysia, where he throngs almost the entire race without a clutch, "could have caused some penalty for the engine. It added: "A more precise analysis can only be made when the engine is back at the works [factory] on Wednesday afternoon. Any trouble with consistency is a worry and we have to make sure we solve it as soon as likely, Ferrari boss Stefano Domenicali told. Unluckily this weekend was our most horrible weekend in terms of an overall result, because of two main factors: consistency was unhappily not good enough, but we cannot forget that the bad result this weekend is mainly related to qualifying. What happened [during qualifying] was not suitable. It's a lesson learned.
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