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Ferrari chief designer Nikolas Tombazis has revealed that the team will be much more aggressive in their approach next season and has credited exhaust changes with an upturn in performance.
The Italian outfit have been unable to match the pace of Red Bull for the majority of the season and endured a particularly poor start to the campaign.
This resulted in a technical reshuffle that saw Aldo Costa parting company with the team and Pat Fry taking control of the technical department.
Results have improved of late with Fernando Alonso winning at Silverstone and finishing second last time out in Germany.
Tombazis says that the change has a lot to do with the team's handling of their exhaust system.
"First of all we've made some improvements in the area of the exhaust."
"We believe that that still has a lot of scope for improvement, and clearly after various rule clarifications and so on, we have a slightly clearer view about what we can do over the next few races to further improve that area. As we have seen there is quite a bit of performance there.
"Further to that, for this race, we had a new rear brake duct. We had in the last race a new rear wing, and we can work with that further because with the DRS this year the wing has some scope for improvement. And we also have a fairly pushy front wing programme that for the next few races will show some further improvements."
While the task of chasing down Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull at the front of the field is a massive one, Ferrari's recent work on the 150° Italia's blown diffuser indicates they have far from given up on this season's campaign.
"[The blown diffuser] is an area of clear performance gain that we have found for this year's car, so some resource naturally has to be spent on this year's car because we want to win races, and we do have quite a few more races ahead of us. Therefore we want to get more wins under our belt," explained Tombazis.
"Obviously, the research is not applicable for next year's car but other things we are doing for this year's car also has some bearing towards next year's car, so it is a bit of a mix on that - trying to prioritise best our resources to cover both cars."
The Greek designer believes that there is room for even further improvement this season.
"I think as long as we are not winning on a race-by-race basis then there is enough margin," he said.
"I think that Silverstone was an indication of a performance improvement, and the Nurburgring is not what would have been considered a track that was favourable to us a few months ago and a few months ago we would have been further behind.
"I think that the developments that we have in the pipeline for the next few races should enable us to be up there fighting."
Looking further ahead to the 2012 campaign, the 43-year-old admits that Ferrari have a huge amount of work to do if they want to produce a title contender, a situation which requires them to be bolder in their decision making.
"We have taken a very fresh approach, and there are a lot of areas of the car that will change substantially," he said of next year's model.
"In that regard it represents a bigger change compares to previous years and previous cars and, quite frankly, we need to do that because we need to make a bigger step forward than we have done previously
"In modern F1 you never start with a clean sheet and throw everything in the bin, and say, 'Okay guys, let's start from zero.' You do have a lot of things you learn from the previous years and you have to apply them.
"I think if you look at the different cars in the pit lane you will find strong points in every single car, even the ones that are slowest, so nobody starts from a totally clean sheet ever. I think the degree of change will be quite big," he added.
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