Hi, I’m Andrew Shovlin and I’m here to
answer your questions from the Hungarian Grand
Prix.
Lewis reported a problem on the formation lap
where he said he thought the engine
was going to stall.
What it actually was,
was a sensor issue that was only affecting
the engine around the idle controls,
so when he was sat there waiting to go off
on the formation lap.
Now, it wasn’t a problem,
it wasn’t going to stall and there is a
protection
that will actually stop the engine from
stalling anyway if you were in that situation.
But we couldn’t tell him it was OK and that’s
because of the rules that prevent you
talking to the driver during that entire
formation lap.
So, we knew it was fine,
but he had to, sort of, worry a bit for
the next few minutes until he got off the
line.
Valtteri’s issue was actually that
he reacted to one of the lights on
his dash that flickered.
And that’s
because he practices starts using his
steering wheel over the weekend and
to simulate the lights going out for the
start grid, the lights on the dash on the
steering wheel go out.
And that was why
he sort of reacted to it, it distracted him.
Now, luckily, he was able to pull the clutch
and avoid a jump start.
Now, there’s
an automatic system that will detect
where the car is and when it has left
the grid box.
And the car can sit within
a reasonably wide position on that grid
box without detecting it, and because Valtteri
hadn’t moved far he was still within range.
So, the system didn’t think it was a jump
start because he was still within his box
when the lights actually went out.
What it did do, though, was cost him
an awful lot of places because resetting
and getting ready to go meant that
everyone else was off and around him
by the time he was getting up to speed.
Timing the call to go from Intermediate
to slick tyres on a drying track is actually
a really difficult thing to get right.
On the pit wall, we have got a lot of the
data, so we can see what lap times
people are doing and also, we can see
from the GPS how fast they are actually
going around the corners.
So, we were
overlaying the Haas cars with other cars
of similar pace who were on the Intermediates,
the Haas were obviously on the dry tyres,
and you could start to see when it was transitioning.
The other thing is the drivers are really
well-placed to judge this.
Because they are
in the car, they can feel the grip, they can
see the dry line appearing and
even on the formation lap, they were
calling to say that there was already
this dry line starting to form.
Now Valtteri
made the call on the second lap, that was his
decision to come in.
Lewis further up the
field at the front of the race didn’t really
need to task risks, so for him we waited
another lap, he transitioned on lap three
but actually the people who got it right
were the Haas cars.
To come in on the
formation lap and start the race on the
dry tyres was the best thing to do and
that is why they were running up at
the front in the early stages.
The decision to do that extra stop with
Valtteri at the end and go onto the Hard
tyre was really just because we thought
that would give us the best chance of
overtaking.
He’d got up behind Max Verstappen
but he wasn’t really able to get through and
the tyres were too similar in age to actually
get that tyre delta that allows you to do it.
The other thing you could see from Max was
actually when Valtteri was behind him,
he was managing his pace, so he was able
to drive off the pace, looking after the
tyres and still comfortably keep Valtteri
behind him.
When Valtteri came in,
Max picked up his pace, so he had to push
because Valtteri had a bit of time to
make up obviously with the pit stop
but he was on a faster tyre.
The reason it was the Hard is that we
only had two Mediums, we’d used
them both by that point and the Soft
tyre was not very good, it would degrade
quite rapidly so you would get a couple
of good laps out of it but then it would
start to drop off.
The Hard tyre was
actually very robust, and it could deal
with that succession of fast laps that
Valtteri was having to put on it.
Unfortunately for us,
the race was a bit too short, I think if Valtteri
had had a couple of laps at the back of Verstappen,
he could have probably made a move stick.
But as it happened, he only just caught him
in the very sort of closing stages of the
race
and unfortunately this time it didn’t work
out for us.
With Lewis, we were in an unusual position
at the end of the race where you have
actually got a pit stop gap to the entire field,
you can come in and take a precautionary stop.
And at one point we were talking about that,
thinking we would put him onto the Hard tyre,
that would give us coverage if there was a
Safety Car for instance, he wouldn’t need to
stop, and he’d be on fresh tyres leading
the race.
As it got nearer the end of the race,
it would start to make more sense to
put him onto the Soft tyre, that would
have grip that would allow him to go for
fastest lap but also it would survive a
short stint and that was kind of one of
the reasons that we decided just to go
for that tyre at the very end.
The weather was definitely quite difficult
in this race.
Now, as it happens, there
wasn’t a lot of rain.
There was a brief shower
around mid-distance, but what we did have
was the constant threat of some rain that
was coming.
How we predict this is actually
with a rain radar.
So, all teams use the
same one, you may well have seen it on the
team’s monitors.
And you can normally see
the clouds coming and know pretty much
where the rain will arrive on the circuit,
how heavy it will be, how long it will last.
Now, in Budapest, that radar is very
difficult to read, it doesn’t really give you
the same accuracy you get at most circuits
and it just adds a bit of uncertainty to it.
With Lewis though, it was really just a
case of building gaps so that if it does
start to rain you don’t need to be the first
to react.
You can look at what everyone
else is doing.
And the key question here
was really, when the rain came, can you
stay out on slick tyres because what you
definitely don’t want to do is come in for
Intermediates and then shortly after
have to come back in again for slicks.
So, really in those situations if you are
leading the race, it’s about building
enough of a gap that you have got the
time just to observe the others and think
about your decisions before you have to make them.
The reason drivers were complaining
about the left-front tyre is actually a
mechanism called graining.
And you
get this in cold conditions, the rubber
becomes more brittle and you actually
start to see waves forming across the tyres,
and those waves drive the tyre wear,
so you start to lose more and more rubber,
and when you lose the rubber, you lose
temperature and you start to lose grip.
Why does it only effect the front-left?
Well, that’s really down to the layout
of the circuit in Budapest.
It’s a clockwise circuit, there’s also
quite a lot of long and fast right-hand
corners and they do most of the work
on that left-hand tyre.
So, it was expected,
and you tend to see it as a bigger problem
on the Softer tyre, so that was why cars
that were running on the Soft, the red tyre,
were really struggling.
You saw Charles Leclerc
complaining very early.
And the Harder tyres
are more resilient to this mechanism.
We can happily report that Bono is fine,
he did get a bit of a soaking.
He’s OK,
ready to go again.
One of the problems
he did notice though was that when the
face mask gets wet, it’s pretty much
impossible to breathe through it.
But it was nice to see him on the podium.
Thank you very much for all your questions,
we are going to be back in two weeks’ time
answering more from the British Grand Prix.
