Well, that was, urm, that was interesting
Hi, I’m James Vowles,
I’m here to answer your questions
about the British Grand Prix,
of which this week there’s a lot of them
First, we want to thank you.
This is the most questions we have
ever had, and we were really blown
away by the amount of interest people
have in it.
All of the questions are
centred around one item,
which is clearly what happened,
what happened at the end of the race?
And today’s Race Debrief is really all about
that,
giving a breakdown of the circumstances
that created it and really looking forward
to next weekend,
what we think will happen as a result of it.
If we go back to Qualifying,
it’s important for everyone to understand
that both ourselves and also Verstappen
lost some of our tyres due to cuts and gravel.
In the case of Valtteri, his rear-right tyre
from his
run on Medium was damaged sufficiently that
we weren’t allowed to run it in the race,
so we had to take a tyre out of his
second Medium allocation.
That doesn’t mean we couldn’t run
Medium with him during the race,
but it would be a compromised set.
Verstappen had the same thing,
I believe both rears in his case were
taken away, and in the case of Lewis,
who spun, all four of those tyres were unusable.
So, as we went into the race, a two-stop
was very compromised.
The fastest two stop would be a
Medium, Hard, Medium but now we
didn’t really have a strong enough set of
Mediums in the case of Valtteri,
and in the case of Lewis we didn’t
have that tyre set available so you’d
have to run Medium, Hard, Soft.
The significance of that is making a
two-stop work with the Soft tyre,
a very weak tyre around Silverstone
where most of the competitors at the
beginning were dying to get off it as
quickly as possible, is tricky.
So, if we review the two-stop
options that we had and especially
reviewing that of Valtteri’s,
we considered it and talked about it
later on in the race but on all of the
models, it was incredibly difficult
to catch back up to Verstappen,
let alone overtake him.
Now, it was available to him most
of the time as a possibility.
But we never considered it.
The Hard was actually the fastest of
all tyres available to us and that’s
what made the proposition of a
two-stop all the more difficult.
We had no concerns in terms of tyre
durability as we were running in the race,
there was no indication from any of our
systems there was going to be a failure.
So, you would rarely stop your car and
put it behind a competitor on a whim,
unless you were guaranteed that
two-stop would work.
If we talk about the vibrations,
there were a lot of questions around that.
The vibrations we were able to see
on our data.
We have a huge amount
of sensors on the car as you would
imagine and some of those allow us
to detect if the tyres are suffering,
whether it’s the front-right or the
front-left, or rears for that matter,
any additional vibration from
what we expect.
We use that to
monitor the condition because
drivers can lock up in the race or can
have other issues and we have limits
that we are happy to run a tyre to,
limits that we have established over many
years.
There was vibration.
It actually appeared
very early on in Valtteri’s stint and you
would’ve heard him on the radio several
times,
lap 40 being the latest of those,
but also would’ve heard us come on
and indicate to him that we can
see a vibration.
Just an indication
that we are using the data to support him.
But at no time were those vibrations a
worry and in the case of Lewis, those
vibrations didn’t exist.
With Valtteri, the
vibrations were to a point where it was
frustrating him but not to the point where
he was losing a dramatic amount of
performance.
If we take Valtteri’s race
relative to Lewis it was always going to
be more difficult.
He was caught up behind
Lewis and having to push very hard in
order to keep up.
He was using speed,
especially in the high-speed corners,
in order to stay close to Lewis and
I have no doubt that he would have
worn his tyre more than Lewis had.
It’s always easier when you are in
free air and controlling your own race.
That may have been a contributing factor,
but the reality was, the failure took place
within seconds of each other and given
the difference in their tyre condition,
it would be unlikely that
that’s all of the contribution.
As we were getting into the dying
stages of the race, the last few laps,
by that point you are not going to stop
for a Safety Car anymore.
The drivers know that the gaps between
them are so enormous, both between Valtteri
and Verstappen and also between Valtteri and
Lewis,
that nothing is really going to happen save
for an
enormous problem.
Kimi went off the track as
we went through the section down 11, 12, 13
and put debris on the side of it.
Both of our drivers went through it
but there were no systems that flagged
up to let us know that there were any
cuts or punctures at that stage.
The failure of Valtteri’s tyre was instantaneous,
the pressure loss was immediate, and it also
took place at absolutely the worst time,
which is at the end of the race, and the
worst place, which is just as he passed the
pit entry.
He had to do an entire lap now on
a deflated tyre and that is why he dropped
back from the position he was in, all the
way back into 11th and that sealed his fate
for the weekend.
In terms of Lewis, the failure actually happened
around Turn 6/7.
We have a plot here that we
thought would be useful to demonstrate to
everyone a little bit of what was going on
with Lewis.
There are three laps on here.
And just to explain what you are seeing,
across the x-axis is the lap, it’s distance,
so as we go across to the right-hand side
that’s as you traverse the lap.
The big lines going up and down is car
speed, so you can see how the car is
effectively, how fast it is through
the different corners and what’s going
on across the lap.
This is a graph that
we use often, and it allows us to describe
what’s going on with the car in quite a
simple way.
Three laps are chosen here,
the first is when Lewis was still pushing,
managing in the high-speed corners but
still pushing and then, to be clear, to
take a Hard to the end of the race,
you need to manage it.
You can’t push
that tyre flat out and we knew that,
and Lewis knew that as well, as did
Valtteri.
Turn 1 and 2 is a corner that
is flat in Qualifying, you can actually
see here on the far left-hand side of
the plot that on lap 45 he wasn’t flat,
he was taking a little bit of speed out
but look how much speed he takes
out of it before the failures.
That is not because he was worried,
that’s because we are getting to the
end of the race and he knows that
that management is even more important.
What you can see here is the third line
represents when the failure happened,
it happened around Turn 6, Turn 7.
One of the questions was, in fact many
of them, how impressive was Lewis in
getting the car home.
The answer is
incredibly impressive.
Especially I would
urge you to look down towards Turn 15,
a very high-speed right-hand corner,
remembering that it’s the front-left
that has gone, the tyre that would be
loaded in that circumstance.
And as
he exits he properly guns it on the
way down into the last sequence of
corners to get across the line.
The fact he took that apex speed with
fundamentally three tyres on the car
is mighty and he did a great job
getting it across the line.
In the case of could we have done things
differently, with Lewis undoubtedly.
There was an opportunity to stop the car.
It happened on the very last lap of the race.
If we had stopped prior to that, we would
have given the win to Verstappen and it’s
important to understand that.
If he had
stayed out and we had stopped and
dropped behind, I’m fairly sure
Red Bull would have stayed out.
Furthermore, Red Bull stopping,
which was for fundamentally the
fastest lap reason as well as perhaps
consideration over tyre durability,
cost them the race win on Sunday.
As we sit here now, we should have
brought that car in.
The reason why
we didn’t was the car was 30 seconds
up the road, Lewis was already
driving many seconds off the pace
and all he needed to do was to do the
last lap of the race in the middle of the
road.
You are not that nervous about running on
a tyre for another lap and there’s risks
involved in doing another pit stop.
Driving around one more lap out there
in the middle of the road up to 15 seconds
off the pace if you wanted to can
sometimes be a safer proposition.
Clearly as we stand here now,
that was a mistake and one that
could have cost us dearly,
and fortunately didn’t on the day.
In terms of what happens now,
clearly, we are going to run again at
Silverstone this weekend the same
way we did in Austria.
We have a wealth
of data available to us, but the compounds
are going to go one step softer this week.
So, the Hard that we used on Sunday,
the tyre that everyone used for that
period of time, is now gone.
The Medium tyre effectively will
become the new Hard.
And the
Medium is a compound called a C2.
We will have the C3 and something
called the C4 as well, that will represent
the softest compounds.
Now, clearly,
we are going to go into Silverstone
now eyes wide open.
The reality behind it is that on Sunday,
the Safety Car coming out as early
as it did pushed all the competitors
into that very long one-stop.
People will be more cautious now
and I am sure you will see a lot more
two-stops, which may just be an
effect of the compounds as well.
A lot of questions this year,
but also specifically this race were
around DAS and whether that
contributed to the failure or not.
I can categorically say the answer is no.
There are a few reasons behind that.
First of all, it wasn’t used any time
really towards the element of the failure,
in fact it was used really towards the
early stages of the race and that’s it.
Next, Sainz also experienced a failure
and clearly, they are not using a DAS
system on their car and a number of
other competitors complained of the
vibration that Valtteri was.
This wasn’t contained to us but
clearly, we were on the worse side of the
problem.
Thank you very much for all of your
questions, hopefully we have answered
everything that you asked, and we look
forward to answering your question
again after the next Grand Prix.
