Ferrari aiming to cut pit stop times

Ferrari have recently been testing with new wheel nuts that the team hope will make pit stops quicker. With no refuelling in 2010 then the pit stops will come down to just tyre changes, in the past the tyres were always on before the fuel was finished going into the car but this year teams will be looking to shave valuable time of their stops. Ferrari have been running a cone like wheel nut that is said to decrease the time taken to change the wheels.

The wheel nut is not new on the Ferrari F10, as Ferrari has sneakily bypassed the winter testing ban by using the new wheel nuts when running the F2008 for Valentino Rossi and Felipe Massa recently at Barcelona, but it seems so far that the new design is working as intended. Red Bull recently stated they are changing tyres in about 2.5 seconds so it will be interesting to see how fast the pit stops become once the racing starts.

The new cone shaped nut integrates better with the wheel guns and has an automatic trigger to fasten the nut, previously this would be done manually by the mechanic. Ferrari designer Nikolas Tombazis said that Ferrari had spent the winter looking at ways to speed up the tyre changing process.

"We have worked over the winter to speed up the process of changing tyres," said Tombazis "In past years the importance of this maneuver was relative, but this year that variable changes, so we tried to reduce pit stop time."