Hi, I’m James Allison, the Technical Director
of the team and I’m here to answer
your questions after the Bahrain Grand Prix.
So, why did we choose to use Soft
tyres in our middle stint in the race?
Well, you have to go back to
the beginning of the weekend
to understand the answer
to this question.
Every weekend, we show up
with a certain number of tyres,
of different types.
Soft, Medium and Hard,
according to the way the rules
of the sport are structured.
And then we attack our Friday
in a way to give us the answer
as to which tyres are going to give
us our best result on the Sunday.
All the teams do this.
All the teams run the different
compounds and try to make a
judgement about what will
suit their car the best.
After our Friday programme,
it was quite clear to us that
we gave our best results over
a stint on the Soft tyres.
So, we wanted to use as many
as possible of those Soft
tyres in the race.
That meant in a two-stop race,
running two sets of the Soft and
then one set of the Medium.
Other teams arrived at different
conclusions because their results
on the Friday pushed them in
different directions.
Ferrari for example were
particularly competitive on the
Medium tyre, so they ran Soft,
Medium, Medium.
But, for us, our quickest race
was found by going Soft, Soft
and Medium. And so that’s what we did.
After a really strong showing
in Melbourne with Valtteri,
it was a little bit of a surprise
also to us to find that he had a
tough race in Bahrain after a
very good getaway from the flag,
he then struggled a bit compared to Lewis.
And after the race, he was saying
that the car didn’t really feel good,
he didn’t feel the car under him well,
the balance was very inconsistent,
struggling from corner to corner
and unable really to get the car
to fly in the way that he had so
easily been able to do in Melbourne.
Why was that? Well, it’s difficult to
know for sure.
I think on the day everyone
was having a tough time.
It was a very, very windy race
and not at all an easy set of
conditions to drive in, on a track
that is notorious for wearing
out the tyres, especially
the rear tyres and giving a
car that gets increasingly tricky
to drive as the tyres get older.
And when you get a car that
is critical like that, because
of the track conditions,
because of the wind,
because of the wearing tyres,
very small things can quite easily
build up to give a big performance
difference because the
effects are cumulative.
A small amount of tyre damage
in one corner here,
another corner there gradually
eats away at the performance
capability of the car and ends
up producing big differences
at the end of the race,
almost the mirror-image in
fact of what we saw with
Lewis in Melbourne just a
couple of weeks ago.
So, no one identifiable,
single thing, just lots of little
things that end up with a cumulative
result that was disappointing for
Valtteri and something he will
want to bounce back from in the next race.
The wind really did play a
part in the Bahrain race.
Wind always affects a
Formula One car but in the
desert of Bahrain, it affects it twice.
Not just because the aerodynamics
of the car are disturbed, and
they really are when the wind is
coming at you from different
angles as you enter and leave corners,
but also because that high wind
whips in dust off the desert which
coats the track and where we can
normally expect on a Sunday
for the race track to get gradually
cleaner and cleaner during
the race, when there is wind
in a track like Bahrain, then it’s
continually recoated with a layer
of dust which makes the car grip
the road less well and adds to the
troubles that were already a
factor caused by the wind.
So, yeah, it’s a big deal and
probably at the beginning of
the race was accounting for
something like a second per lap
compared with what we might’ve
expected in a less windy event.
Undercuts play a big part in the
strategic choices made by the teams.
That’s because over
the course of a stint,
tyres gradually get slower and slower,
meaning that if you come in and
put fresh tyres on you go a lot quicker.
That gives you opportunities
around a pit stop to jump
in front of someone,
by putting on a faster set
of tyres and throwing in a
quick lap and perhaps surprising
someone who stayed out
on the track. Now, at a
normal circuit, at a normal
circuit the amount that the
tyre gets slower by over a
stint is about one second.
So, at the end of your stint,
if you come in, you can put
new boots on and effectively
get a jump of about one second
relative to your opponent.
Bahrain is a very different
sort of track. Here, the
asphalt is super rough, super hard
on the tyres and as a result,
instead of just slowing down
by one second over the tyre life,
they slow down by about two,
two and a half seconds.
Which mean that the car who
comes in first, the car who
comes in first and puts on
fresh rubber will go insanely
faster for a lap or two compared
with the one that stayed out.
And that means you can really
jump forward by a huge amount.
We saw this illustrated probably
most strongly with Lewis in his
second stop relative to Sebastian.
Before the stop, Lewis was about four,
three and a half, four seconds
behind Sebastian. One lap of fresh
rubber after the stop and he
was able to close up almost to the
back of Sebastian’s car,
giving us the chance then to attack
and eventually overtake him.
So, in Bahrain, the undercut becomes a
really, really important tool for the
strategists and often determines
the outcome of the race.
Did we consider a one-stop
with Valtteri in the race?
Well, yes, we did and in fact we
considered it also with Lewis, and
we considered a two-stop
and a three-stop.
Every race, before we actually conduct
the race itself, we scan through all
the strategic options, trying to
do the maths to make sure we
make the right decision
on the day.
So, we weigh up one stop,
we weigh up two,
we weigh up three.
And when we looked at
the numbers from Bahrain,
it was very clear on the Friday,
in fact it was our guess
before we even arrived there,
that this was going to
be a two-stop race.
The tyres at Bahrain
have a really hard time,
the track is super rough,
and it wears away the
rubber really quickly.
Furthermore, the tyres
for this year have less
tread on them than last year,
which means that they run
out of their life even quicker
as a result. And so, where last
year was a marginal one-stop,
just possible if you were
really delicate, this year
it looked pretty nailed-on
for a two-stop.
And you saw with all
the cars on the grid
that they ended up going
for two stops and it
was the quickest strategy.
So, we considered it,
we worked out the numbers,
but fairly early on we were
concentrating on the two-stop
and in the race itself,
there was nothing to make
us change our mind on that.
Two stops was the quickest
way and one-stop would’ve
been incredibly difficult and a lot slower.
Probably the simplest answer
is because this is a really,
really difficult sport,
where you have to get
absolutely everything perfect
if you want to have a weekend
like you had in Melbourne.
We were immensely strong there
and everything seemed to
go our way. We’d expected
a much tougher result in Australia,
coming off of winter testing
we expected perhaps even to
be chasing a Ferrari
in front of us.
But instead we found
ourselves flying in every session,
in Qualifying, in the race
and in the Free Practice,
and able to just effortlessly
breeze out into the lead
and get a really strong result.
And then we go to Bahrain
and instead we find ourselves
on the back foot.
Very different tracks with
different characteristics and
we right from the outset had
a car that was a little bit unhappy.
Where it had flown in Melbourne,
we had a car instead in Bahrain
that was a bit nervous at
the rear end, which was a
bit hard on its tyres,
which was suffering a bit
with overheating at the rear.
All those things meant that
we just lose a tenth or two
here or there and compared
to a Ferrari that seemed to
be having in Bahrain the
weekend that we had just
two weeks earlier in Melbourne.
It’s a really difficult sport to get
everything just right and the key
thing is when you are having a
difficult weekend like we just
had, to make sure that you
don’t give up.
To make sure that you keep
in every session trying to
get the car pushed further
up the grid, to be able to
go quicker and quicker and
able to get as much as
possible from it.
So, a huge result for us
and a great relief therefore
on a weekend where we
were not that competitive to
come back with such a strong
haul of points, to come
back with those points and
also to come back with clear
indications of what we need
to do, and the directions we
need to take, to develop our
car so we will not suffer the
same sort of problems that
we had with it in Bahrain.
And of course, our aim will
be that over the course of
the season, we bring enough
performance to the car that
even when we stumble slightly,
we can still be out in front.
That’s the aim of every team.
But, it’s one that we are determined
to deliver on here and one that
we have been reasonably good
at over previous seasons.
So, lots of work for us to do
but a really happy result from
what was otherwise
quite a difficult weekend.
Thank you very much for
all of your questions.
We’ll be back after the
Chinese Grand Prix to
answer another load of them.
