One of the traditional tasks at the start of the race weekend is the track walk. The driver, together with his engineers, walks the length of the circuit, looking at kerbs, cambers, runoffs and so forth. What the team saw left everyone a little shocked: while word had filtered through that the track had been resurfaced, no-one was quite expecting the mirror-smooth, exceptionally slick asphalt that greeted them. Thoughts immediately turned to the practice run plan and baseline set-up, the thinking being that both might need to be altered. 

Freshly laid tarmac is always more slippery than the stuff that’s had years to weather. It takes months – sometimes longer – for the aromatic compounds to cure, with all sorts of oils rising to the surface while that’s happening. Ahead of FP1, the track was washed down in an attempt to improve the grip. It had the opposite effect: the surface had an oily sheen on top when the pitlane light went green. Every driver was struggling to stay on track, even when driving in a straight line. Both McLaren drivers remarked it was the lowest-grip surface they had every used. Carlos simply started laughing as he tip-toed around the 5.388km circuit. His morning would get worse when the power unit developed an electrical fault that first required an investigation in the garage and then caused him to stop out on track with only 12 laps on the board. 

Lando celebrated his 21st birthday on Friday. On Thursday, and, in proper F1 style, he received his cake, presented by Carlos and Andreas Seidl. During the press conference, he’d also suggested – firmly tongue-in-cheek – that he expected gifts from everybody in the garage. While that may have been above and beyond the call of duty, race engineer Will Joseph was preparing a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ from the crew of car #4 by way of a radio check on his installation lap. It’s common for the drivers to do a radio check during their first lap of the weekend, calling out the numbers of each corner as they circulate and, in turn, receiving a confirmation message. It doesn’t have to be a simple acknowledgement. In the end, Will decided to forego the singing. The track surface was so slippery, Lando definitely didn’t need another distraction. 

Offline and driver-in-the-loop simulators used in F1 are pretty sophisticated, and it's a rare race when they forecast lap-times more than a second or two off what happens in the real world. In Istanbul, the gap in FP1 was closer to 15 seconds. It dropped in FP2 as rubber went down and the track gripped-up – but the grip was washed away on Saturday morning when the rain started falling. In absolute terms, it really didn’t rain that hard – certainly the sort of volume that wouldn’t cause huge problems for a rain tyre at Silverstone or Spa. Here, it presented a daunting challenge. One quandary for the drivers was choosing between the Intermediate and the full Wet tyre. The lap times suggested the full Wet – but the volume of water were more in-line with an Inter. Unusually, it came down to personal preferences. Carlos seemed happier on the Wet tyre, Lando on the Inter.

It was a bemused garage during Q3 with both cars back in the garage preparing for parc fermé. This is the first time in 2020 that the team hasn’t had at least one car active in the final part of qualifying and the feeling was quite uncomfortable. Both drivers initially went out on the Inter tyre in Q2 but struggled to keep heat in the compound. They switched to the full Wet partway through the session – but that tyre seemed to get faster with every lap, and all of our competitors had been using it for longer. To make a bad situation worse, both drivers picked up penalties post-session for infringements during qualifying. Opinions on these were divided: one view held that it wasn't a weekend where we needed any more bad luck; the other said it was better here than on a day where we’d qualified well. Either way, on Saturday evening the team was looking at a mountain to climb on Sunday morning. 

A highly unusual situation developed on Sunday lunchtime when the final grid, to much consternation, didn’t appear. It’s supposed to be issued one hour before the race start, and has the practical value of allowing the teams to know which grid slot they’ll be using, and – where there’s a real difference in grip between left and right – what clutch settings to use. Because a penalty for a competitor was still being assessed, the team sent the cars out on their reconnaissance laps without a completely clear idea where they’d have to go at the end of them. The drivers had more pressing worries, however, with rain falling. Carlos had a spin on his recon laps, a couple of rivals went off and both sets of engineers decided to curtail the number of laps-to-grid and just get the cars there in one piece. 

Grip and visibility tend to dominate a wet race – but most people tend to think of visibility in terms of looking forward into a cloud of spray, rather than looking rearwards in the mirrors. This weekend it was both: with huge pace differentials between cars, according to the age and temperature of tyres, both drivers needed to know who was coming up behind them, how quickly and on which side. They couldn’t see anything in their mirrors, and so had to rely on information relayed from the pitwall – which is delicate work indeed. The pit crew were handed the thankless task during the stops of cleaning mirrors and visor – naturally while losing absolutely no time. 

There’s been some debate over whether the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix was F1 at its finest or something more akin to Tokyo Drift. No one, however, is questioning the quality of the entertainment. After spending most of the race perched on the edge of their seats, the garage was on a high at the chequered flag. The stark mathematics say we lost ground in the battle for third place in the Constructors’ Championship but putting a good margin between ourselves and Renault, and keeping the gap between ourselves and Racing Point to five points put the team in good spirits departing the circuit. Onwards to Bahrain.