The approach to Turn One is the fastest part of the track and will be even quicker if you have DRS – and so the entry to Turn One is a very quick start to the lap. You begin braking almost simultaneously with turn-in, taking the corner in fourth or fifth gear – probably fifth in qualifying. The exit tightens up a little, so you need to take a late apex to open it up. While it is the primary overtaking spot, it doesn’t look like it would be easy to go around the outside: you can’t carry enough speed and you’ll just get run-out wide. 

After Turn One, you immediately need to get back across to the right-hand side for Turn Two. Again, it’s another pretty quick corner but with a normal braking profile. This is all about maximising speed through the corner because there’s a short straight afterwards and you need to maintain speed all the way down to Turn Four. There’s nothing much to say about Turn Three: it’s flat!

You will just about get the steering straight between Turn Four and Turn Five but they feel like one corner. You need to be in a good rhythm here because these two really do flow together. Both are very quick. You brake for Turn Four, take the corner in fifth gear and try to carry as much speed as you can. For Turn Five, fifth gear again, with some cars having a small lift and others – possibly – being flat out. 

Turn Six is the slowest corner on the track, dropping down to third gear. It has a double apex. You want to turn in, hit the first apex, run a little wide and pick up the second apex to get a good exit. It is a hairpin – but it’s a very wide radius hairpin, so you can turn it into a ‘V’. This could be an opportunity to talk to your race engineer because after this the rest of the lap is all rapid and it’ll get very loud!

Turn Seven is similar to Turn One, in that you want to carry good speed in – but the corner exit tightens on you, making it very easy to run wide. The track starts curving to the left for Turn Eight very early, which means you’re feeding the car over to the left quite early too, and you run out of space very quickly – it pays to be patient getting back on the throttle.

Turns Eight and Nine are both full throttle. Turn Nine won’t be entirely straightforward, as you’ll have to be a little bit aggressive to bring the car back to the right in preparation for Turn 10. Rewinding a bit, the speed you can carry though this section is dependent on getting the exit right out of Turn Seven: you’ll carry that speed all the way into Turn 10. 

Turn 10 is another high-speed corner, and you really can carry a lot of speed from the mid-corner to the exit because the exit does open up. You really do need to maximise that exit to carry speed all through the final sector and you can do it because the kerbs are very flat – which means the FIA are going to be watching the track limits very carefully here.

Turn 12 to 14 is the section everyone’s going to be looking at. For an F1 car it’s one, big, impressive corner, rather like Turn Eight in Turkey. It should be flat, at least in qualifying – but it won’t be if teams have gone too low on downforce. With heavy fuel, it’ll be difficult to be flat, and you may see a lift, perhaps not for 12 or 13 but certainly for 14, just to protect the tyres. 

This is probably the trickiest of the high-speed corners because it isn’t quite flat out. The approach speed is very, very high speed, because you’ve been at full throttle all the way from Turn 10. In qualifying, it won’t be a braking point but you’ll see a little lift, whereas in the race with a heavier car it’ll be a brake and a downshift. 

The DRS detection point comes just after the pit entry and before Turn 16. This is the second slowest corner on the track – but it’s still going to be somewhere between fourth and fifth gear, which tells you how quick this circuit is. It’ll be fourth gear if you want to go ‘V-style’ – but as the track grips-up over the weekend, it’ll become fifth gear pretty soon.

We also have a brand-new pit entry for this race, taken just before the final corner. It’s difficult to judge what this will be like, as no one has really seen it yet or discovered where the pit-limiter lines are. In terms of pit-loss I think the track will be somewhere in the middle of the pack, but the team will have to do some aggressive entry and exit practice to refine the numbers.

Rhythm is going to be very important around this circuit because the corners blend into one another. This, together with the high-speed nature of the corners make the track a bit like Mugello – albeit without the banking.

There’s a lot of loading on the tyres but with Pirelli’s hardest rubber on offer, I think you should be fine to push all the way around a quali lap, and you won’t have to compromise the first few corners to help out at the end of the lap. The front-left tyre could be the limit or the rears – it will depend on which way the wind is blowing! These cars are very sensitive to wind, and that’s going to be a problem with all of these high-speed entries. With a headwind there are corners that are easy flat, but if the wind switches direction and those same corners are approached with a tailwind, then it can all become a lot more difficult. You’ll have to study the flags to know if you’re going to get oversteer or understeer.

Overtaking is going to be difficult, because it’s going to be tough to follow through the high-speed sections – but it is going to be a race where there’s a big lap time delta between old and new tyres, simply because of the circuit profile, and that will aid overtaking.