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 Monaco Grand Prix.

Adrian Goodwin is leading this weekend’s briefing and there’s plenty on the agenda. The switch to a street track means a switch in set-up, which is where we need your help as Adrian's right hand. It goes without saying that Qualifying will be key, but this year we’ll want to pay special attention to porpoising and tyre behaviour.

Take notes if you need them, but please keep them to yourself.

Engineer: Adrian Goodwin
Event: Monaco Grand Prix
Circuit: Circuit de Monaco

Background

Monaco doesn’t have much in common with Barcelona – but we’ll be running a very similar aerodynamic package this weekend to what we had in Spain. The only real difference is that we’ll put on the very last bit of downforce, which effectively is just a bigger rear wing gurney that we didn’t use last weekend, because of the long straight.

There are limits in the technical regulations, and limits imposed by the cost-cap, on what you can do around the car this year, so what we have here is a step-up in peak downforce – but not a very big step.

The challenges

The challenge for the weekend is getting the balance in the car to go with it. The main thing with Monaco is always going to be just getting driver time to get the laps in, and allowing them to find speed through being comfortable and confident.

I’d hate to say our practice run plans this year have been boring – but let’s say that they’ve been quite routine. The primary task is finding out how low we can run the car – because there’s just so much performance in getting it lower.

What we're finding with the cars this year is that performance really is coming in how low you can run, which means how stiff can you run? And in Monaco, it's going to be quite bumpy. So that trade-off is quite challenging.

Bahrain was quite bumpy – but it's not a street track, so this is the first time we’ve had the combination of a really bumpy surface and absolutely no margin for error. This could be quite interesting to see how people get on.

Agenda

1 | Street circuit

We’ll do the usual street track thing of making the car quite compliant and nice to drive initially, then gradually build in performance. We get a first read from our simulations and then, given how green the track is likely to be, we’ll set-up on the conservative side of that, then start pushing the stiffnesses up to find-out where the limit is.

2 | Set-up

We’ll be taking a pragmatic approach to configuring the cars. This will mean running older-spec components – front wings, for example – on Friday, to ensure we have the new ones and spares available for qualifying and the race.

At the front of the car, the limitation is how much you are going to wear the skids over the course of the race, dropping the car as much as you can in compliance with that. It’s also a question of having good braking confidence. What you don’t want is the front so low that the car just crashes into the ground under braking.

The rear end is more about global load, and it is the priority for Friday. It’s limited by three factors: skid wear at the rear of the car; any contact with the side of the floor in high-speed corners (the Tunnel could be a limitation there this weekend) and, finally, any porpoising you need to raise the car out of.

3 | Managing porpoising

With our Barcelona update, we have a little more downforce and thus a little more porpoising to deal with. It is something that needs to be carefully studied in Monaco, where the bumpy surface certainly won’t help the problem. You need to find the limit and then not be too aggressive with it.

Turn Three [Massenet] or Turn 12 [Tabac] could conceivably be problematic corners for porpoising, and potentially quite painful, given the inconsistency it introduces. It's not inconceivable your drivers may end-up porpoising into a wall the first time, and then they'll have to back off to make sure that they don't risk the car.

It isn’t something you can get rid of entirely: the car is quicker the lower you can run it – but it introduces this inconsistency you just have to live with as best you can.

4 | Tyres

The other thing we’ll want to look at is tyre behaviour. We’ve got Pirelli’s three softest compounds for the first time this year – though each of the individual compounds has been used before. The C5 isn’t quite as big a step from the C4 as was the case last year – but otherwise the tyres this year have been reasonably ‘normal’.

We’ll want to know what the tyre warm-up is like. Historically, warm-up is problematic in Monaco, with drivers often having to do a warm-up lap before a timed lap. This year, we have lower blanket temperatures, which may exacerbate the issue. We’ll need to understand the best way to prepare the tyres for a timed lap before the vital quali session.

While there is a strong qualifying-bias here. We’ll want tyre information for the race also – particularly given the free choice of starting tyre for everyone this year, which introduces more variables. We’ll want to know if the tyres are going to grain or blister – though probably more likely graining with the temperatures we're expecting.

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

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