Welcome to the Race Debrief
from the Styrian Grand Prix.
We’re here in Austria with me,
Shov, and James.
In terms of wet or dry set-ups,
there are a few things you can change.
One might be the wing level, but we
decided to stay with our dry wing
level because that would give us
the best pace in the race on Sunday.
We knew that the race was going to be dry.
There are other things you are allowed
to do within the regulations when it rains
because they declare a change of
climatic conditions, and you can
change the cake tin spec.
And that
allows you to inject a bit of heat into
the tyres to put some more temperature
in them, and then they work better in the
cold, wet conditions.
But fundamentally
we didn’t actually change a lot on the car,
and it was really just… the focus for us
was Sunday, it was on the race, making
sure we have got the fastest car possible.
So, Lewis’s lap, no it wasn’t really down
to a wet set-up, it was just down to him
driving, getting the tyres in the right
window and a lot of skill and yeah,
a fantastic lap in the end.
The issues with the kerbs,
we did a lot of work back at the
factory, we had a new installation
of that gearbox loom and that
was the component that was really
causing us the grief the week before.
And it seemed that we managed to make
that go away.
So, we are going to keep
an eye on it, just check that we have
got the reliability that we need as we
accumulate miles on those parts but
there was a lot of good work and the
race was much, much easier to manage as a
result.
The benefit of a wet qualifying is
that you now have free choice, all
teams have free choice as to what tyre
you want to start the race on.
And there
were really only two choices,
the Soft or the Medium.
The week before you saw that the
track temperature was very high,
somewhere around 53 degrees.
But on Sunday the track was much cooler,
there was a lot more cloud cover and
the ambient temperature was down as well.
The week prior, we started on the Soft
and you saw Red Bull and in fact a lot of
the cars outside the top 10 on
that Medium compound,
perhaps a little bit more
durable in temperature but we
were happy with our starting tyre choice.
On Sunday, the Soft was the tyre
that we felt would give the best start
performance, the best first stint
performance and the ability really for
Valtteri to fight back through Sainz,
up to Verstappen and it also gave you
free choice as to what tyre you wanted
to run on stint two of the race.
It could be that you could run the Hard
tyre or the Medium tyre, just depending
on where you stopped in the race.
Whereas the Medium near enough
commits you to a Hard if you are stopping
early, which isn’t as competitive.
So,
ultimately, the way we go about that is
we have tools in the background that
run millions of simulations.
Lewis during the race after the pit stop
when he was on the Medium tyre said
that the tyres felt to him a little bit
softer than the week before.
That’s one of the mechanisms he
uses to describe really how the tyres
feel to him in the car in terms of degradation.
It prompts us to go and look at the models
and make sure that we are happy that the
tyres are wearing the way we expect them
to and degrading the way we expect them
too as well.
In other words,
will he comfortably be able to get to
the end of the race at the rate he is
pushing the tyres, or should he
manage a little bit more or a little bit less.
So, that question really prompted us to go
back through everything we understand,
we have a wealth of information both from
car data and strategic data on how the tyres
are performing.
As it turns out, we were
very happy with what he was doing,
he was managing the race perfectly
and there was no action for him to take.
Before the race started, we went
through a number of scenarios with Valtteri.
The main one was he had to get through
Sainz very, very quickly but his race was
with Verstappen and Lewis ultimately
if he had good race pace on the day.
With Max, who was either going to start
on the Soft or the Medium but ultimately
start on the Soft, you have to options.
Either go for an aggressive undercut
onto the Medium, but you have got to
be within one and a half seconds of him
to make that work and have a chance of it.
Or force him in, get into his undercut range
and then go very, very long.
The latter of those
two options is obviously what we used on the
day and Valtteri used it to good effect.
He was able to go 10 laps offset relative to
Max and you use all of that degradation
difference that Max will now be
experiencing on that Medium tyre,
to catch back up and then overtake him end of race.
Around about lap 57 you saw
actually Verstappen complaining of his rear tyres.
He also suffered a bit of front wing damage,
but his rear tyres were definitely in a poor state
and it’s that that you’re banking on.
You’re banking that he is going to push
very hard to build the gap, your tyres are
in a much better state and you are able to
overtake him on track, Things were going
very, very well for Valtteri until we caught
up to some backmarker traffic.
There was Giovinazzi and Gasly fighting
each other for 11th place in front and
they were fighting very hard on track,
it was very difficult for Valtteri to get
through and at that time, probably not
caught that well on TV, but we lost three
to four seconds worth of race time,
which in our world is enormous.
So, we had a gap of around about six seconds
to Verstappen before he caught the traffic
and it was around nine and a half afterwards,
so a big, big loss.
Valtteri though just got his
head down, chipped away at it, and
caught up.
Did a great job on the day.
There was a bit of damage on Valtteri’s
car.
The floor around the tyre seal area had
broken and that loses you a few points
of downforce, it is quite a sensitive area.
But the bigger issue for him was actually
some tape and it was tape that
must have come off another car, that
had got wrapped around the lower deflectors.
Now, those are the winglets that sit on the
uprights at the back of the car.
It’s a very,
very sensitive aero area and that was
actually the big performance loss for him.
So, we can estimate that from the data
that we collect off the car.
It’s something
around one to two tenths of performance
that he would have been missing in
that latter part of the race.
There are definite benefits going to the
same circuit with the same tyres, it does
make life easier and you don’t need to
repeat all the work that you normally do
on a Friday to get all the data that you
need to then plug into the strategy simulations.
But actually, these tyres are the same tyres
as we had the year before so even last week,
we went in with a pretty good idea of how
they were going to perform.
It’s also
quite interesting for us because you can
see how the tyres work on a hot track,
on a cool track, you can understand
how the car performance varies.
So, there’s actually quite a lot that
we can learn and that we benefit from
with this format of two races in the
same place.
But I’ll let James talk
about the strategy because
obviously there are big impacts
for him in that regard.
Yeah very much so.
As Shov says, when you go into it,
you have a much better idea now
of really what your tyres are going to
do in different tyre temperature conditions.
We had a track temperature that was 33
the week before on Friday and 51 during
the race.
And during the race on Sunday,
it was around about 36 so we get the 
opportunity to…
really experience a range of conditions.
[Laughing]
What did he say?
Is this the way to Budapest?
[Laughing]
No two races are identical.
Be it where you qualify or be it the
competitiveness of you versus other
teams.
So, in this race for example,
we were stronger than we were the week
before I would argue with two of our cars
fighting up front.
Now, clearly, one thing
that comes across is you learn from your
mistakes.
So, as tempting as it was to
stop on the early Safety Car, we
fortunately stayed out that time.
What you do seriously learn though is
understanding a little bit more about
how to optimise relative to your competitors.
When you go into the first race, you don’t
truly understand how fast they are,
where their weaknesses are, where
their strengths are, how difficult it
is to overtake on track.
By the time
you get to the second race and the
third race and the fourth race, you
understand far, far more about the
characteristics of that year.
So, as
you repeat a race at the same circuit,
it’s a wealth of data that you didn’t
have the week prior and you keep
building that as you go through.
Thank you very much for joining us on
this Race Debrief.
This week you have a
two for one offer, probably next week
back to just the one of us unfortunately.
But thank you from me.
Thank you from me, yeah.
We’ll look forward to answering
more of your questions after the
Budapest Grand Prix next weekend.
