Italian magazine Quattroroute sat down with Antonello Coletta, Head of Ferrari’s GT (and Endurance) programmes at last weekends Ferrari World Finals event at Mugello.
And there are several nuggets of information in that interview – which you can read here in Italian – which will be of interest to readers here.
Coletta confirmed that the design process for the project is almost complete, and revealed too that Ferrari “plan to start assembling the first prototypes around January-February.”
That then leads through to a current programme for the first on-track test in June 2022 with a test programme set to span the following six months: “to look for reliability, performance and to understand if there will be, or not, things to correct.”
Finally on the timeframes for the cars and programme the interview confirms once again that the car’s debut is set to be in March 2023 “probably in America,” which strongly indicates that the WEC aspect of ‘Super Sebring’ is being targeted. Coletta also suggests that the cars will have to be shipped to the USA much sooner, a further test programme then is likely for one of the most widely anticipated debuts in Sportscar racing for many years.
On the subject of driver selection for the AF Corse operated effort Coletta made it clear that six drivers would be selected and that the first search would be done from within the marque’s own ranks.
Coletta himself is set to be at the helm of the driver selection process and will be looking far deeper than simple speed, technical ability and the chemistry between the crew members were both mentioned as determining factors.
In answer to a question about the strengths of the current Ferrari GT Competition drivers there was high praise for Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado, both individually and as a pairing, with honourable mentions too for Miguel Molina, Nicklas Nielsen and Alessio Rovera though there was no confirmation whatsoever as yet that any or all of them were to be part of the LMH programme.
