Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Allison expects Ferrari to close gap to Mercedes

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Ferrari technical director James Allison expects the team to close the gap to Mercedes once again in the second half of the season.

Victory in Malaysia in just the second race of the year saw Ferrari tipped to challenge Mercedes for the championship, but since then Mercedes has dominated and won every race. Allison admits expectations increased too quickly as a result of the win, but attributes recent struggles to a big step forward from Mercedes in Canada and he believes Ferrari will fight back after the summer break.

Speaking to Autosprint, when asked if it would have been better if the win in Malaysia came later in the year, Allison replied: “Perhaps in managing expectations yes, but you can not refuse a success when it arrives.

“The win in the Malaysian Grand Prix was an incredible joy, winning again was gratifying and highly motivating, but now I can not wait to be able to live it again.

“If I look at what has been done since the beginning of the season, I think the work has produced good results. We have improved lap time by around a second and a half thanks to the development both on the car and on the power unit. In the first part of the season updates came much faster than the competition, so we have reduced the gap that was big in Melbourne, competing in some races with a very consistent performance.

“Then we saw that the Mercedes-powered teams took a huge leap forward since Montreal, and the gap has widened again. But if I had to bet on what will happen in the second half of the season, I think we will get back to reducing the gap to Mercedes and we're going to get the better of Williams.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.