Got your pass? Check. McLaren kit? Check. Okay, good, now switch off your phone and follow us through the glass doors and into the Paddock Performance Centre. Grab a coffee on your way in, and we’ll get started with our engineering briefing for the São Paulo Grand Prix, presented by DataRobot.

The addition of a Sprint makes this weekend an intriguing and unique one. A Sprint requires the team to nail their colours to the mast earlier than usual, with no further changes to the cars permitted from the start of qualifying.

That leaves only FP1 for the team to learn the circuit and make their tweaks, at a track where we've experienced relatively little practice running the last three years, due to the race being cancelled in 2020, and 2021 also using the Sprint format.

The Autódromo José Carlos Pace is one of the most historic circuits on the calendar, so we do know it well, but with a new generation of car, there will be a lot of work to complete in a short period of time at a track that isn't short of challenges, with camber changes, bumps and banking to contend with.

Will Joseph is running this weekend's engineering briefing and will look to explain and simplify the impacts of the Sprint format on the team at Interlagos and the work we will be doing ahead of qualifying. Take notes if you need them, but please keep them to yourself.

Engineer: Will Joseph 
Event: São Paulo Grand Prix
Circuit: Autódromo José Carlos Pace 

Background

Friday on a Sprint weekend is… stressful! Very, very stressful. Our opportunities to improve the car happen in a short FP1 session, and in the interval between that and qualifying. It makes the day incredibly busy - the format moves where the pressure points are located over the race weekend.

There’s nothing new on the car this weekend, so we don’t have the complication of experiments to run. It’s not because it’s very late in the year for upgrades, but mainly because a Sprint weekend isn’t the right place to try out new bits and pieces.

Key points

1 | Sprint format implications 

It’s important to get a good read on all things cooling, whether that be brake temperatures or engine cooling, it’s all very important to us. You often see people head straight out into continuous laps in order to get a read on this.

With only an hour, you’ve got maybe three runs to dial yourself in, answer all your questions as best you can, and get the information you want to set-up in time for quali – because as soon as qualifying starts, we’re locked-in.

The skids are interesting this week because we have to do a lot more running on them. On a normal weekend, they would just have to survive qualifying and the race. Here, we have qualified and then we have to keep them on for all of FP2, the Sprint and the race. It requires a slightly more cautious approach, and we need to learn it very quickly.

We would hope to start with the car in a sensible place to give the driver the opportunity to extract the lap time, and explore lines, approaches. With one session, you want to give him the time to understand the car and get the most from it, and then make minor tweaks to take the car in the right direction, rather than big changes.

2 | Bumps

We know Interlagos is a bumpy track, we just don’t know how bumpy it will be, and because this is a Sprint weekend, it’s difficult to find out. The sort of sensors we would normally fit for Friday, we don’t use on a Sprint weekend because we wouldn’t have time to remove them before qualifying.

Last year was also a Sprint, and we didn't have a race in 2020, so a lot of the ride analysis we've done is based on a bump profile from 2019. There's still kerbs to run, so this is still a track that requires you to be able to benefit from having a good ride. So, there's a little bit of empirical learning to do.

3 | Ride height 

The other set-up factor that is considered to be very important – especially the way we operate the car – is rear-ride height. Can we get the rear-ride height nice and low? And what's the limitation on that?

The interesting thing about ride heights is that, for your front skid, DRS laps are very important, because this is where you do most damage – but in terms of the plank and the rear of the floor, the non-DRS laps are far more important. So, getting the balance right between those two is crucial.

4 | Downforce 

Also of interest is downforce level. Last year, we ran max downforce. This year, our scans aren’t showing much difference between the maximum rear wing and the next one down. We’ve seen a slight trend to run a little less downforce in 2022 when the right direction isn’t obvious – but there is the threat of bad weather, so it could go either way.

5 | FP2

Our second and final practice session will be tomorrow, after qualifying and before the Sprint. Clearly, there’s less we can do with set-up with the car’s in parc fermé conditions – but there’s a lot we can do with driving lines, tyre saving, tyre management, and really understanding what the tyres are going to do in the Sprint and Sunday’s race.

When the Sprints were first talked about, there were people saying, ‘oh, FP2 isn't that relevant anymore,’ but actually, we find that we still do quite a bit of learning that we can then take into the race. It is more about tyre understanding at that point – but there’s always more we’d like to know about the tyres.

Briefing complete. Time for Lando and Daniel to head out onto the track so we can collect some data and put our hard work to the test.

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