The ‘brave’ call to stop using the recent upgrades is the big key behind Ferrari’s upsurge in recent times, the Italian outfit acknowledged.

After struggling to find a good pace in the last few races, the Maranello outfit decided to remove all components introduced since the Singapore GP. Ferrari has been running the same car since the US Grand Prix, and it seems to be working in their favour.

The move got Kimi Raikkonen his first win ever since his return to the outfit.

The Scuderia tested the new floor at the Friday practice at Interlagos and dropped the idea since it did not match their expectations. Admitting they took a wrong path was a big move for Ferrari, says Ferrari’s senior performance engineer Jock Clear.

“Over the course of this season, we haven’t quite got it spot on at every race,” he said. “The positive is we understand why.

“Those couple of races where we did have a slump, we came back in Austin, and we were brave enough to go back on some of the development.

“That’s the kind of culture that we want to have now. That people are brave enough to say, ‘OK, I think we’ve made a mistake.’

“We go back, we re-learn what we thought we understood, and we come back in Austin and we win the race, and we were competitive again in Mexico. So that’s the positive to it.”

The new floor only got a trial run and is unlikely to be used in the race. But the team will continue to work with experimental parts, Clear added.

“I think we brought pretty much an aerodynamic upgrade to every race this year so we have various options open to us, depending on the circuit to circuit, we try and find the best combination,” he explained.

“The positive is that we are producing these options, that the wind tunnel is continuing to produce effectively tools for us to use from race to race.

“Our job as race engineers on the operational side is to make the most of the bits we’ve been given and that’s the process.

“For example, you’ve seen in FP1, we did a comparison between two floors, two front wings, bargeboards, those sorts of things.

“And then from then on, we’ll decide which combination is giving us the best performance for this track. That’s just a normal process for us.”