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With 22 circuits, there can be a lot to take in, so we’ve organised for you to join us in Lando, Oscar and Pato’s engineering briefings, where we’ll walk you through this weekend’s key trackside topics so that you can enjoy the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to its fullest.

For the first time since the Italian Grand Prix in September, we’ve arrived at a circuit where both Lando and Oscar have prior experience, and we’ll be making the most of that in practice, with Pato borrowing Lando’s car for FP1 and both drivers getting a head start on our 2024 preparations.

But, primarily, practice will be about maximizing our performance around the Yas Marina Circuit, because the flipside of a track that everybody is comfortable on, is that the competition is that much tighter, which makes the finer details more important.  

Jose Manuel López will be leading this weekend’s engineering briefing, in partnership with Google Chrome, and he’ll explain what we already know about Abu Dhabi and how we’re working to ensure we come out on the right side of those fine margins, with a focus on tyres and strategy will be key.

It’s time to begin. Grab a coffee and follow us through the glass doors and into the Paddock Performance Centre. Take notes if you need them, but please keep them to yourself.

Engineer: Jose Manuel López
Event: Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
Circuit: Yas Marina Circuit

The pros and cons of familiar surroundings

Abu Dhabi is a circuit that all the teams and drivers know well, and there’s few surprises. I think we’re all happy getting back to a circuit like this! At the same time, having this familiarity means the gaps will be tighter, competition closer, and every millisecond we can find on the car will be very important. The margins in between the teams are going to be tiny.

What was Pato working on in FP1?

First thing to say is that we have Pato in Lando’s car for FP1. It doesn’t change a great deal in the run plan – he’ll be doing essentially the same set of experiments that we would have done with Lando. We will, however, try to give him a few more laps. He’s driven our cars at this circuit before, but a few more laps will help him get the most from the experience today.

Free practice focus points

The job list for Friday features several different focus points. We need to understand the tyres, for both racing and qualifying. At the same time, we need to tune the car to this very smooth track because ride-heights, front and rear, on these cars are a key parameter. Also downforce levels here come with a genuine choice attached. We have a lot of boxes to tick to make sure we have done our due diligence before qualifying.

As ever, learning about the tyres will be key

Starting with tyres – because everything starts with tyres – Yas Marina is a very interesting circuit. For our single-lap pace we need to discover how best to prepare and use the Soft tyres. In the past, when this circuit had more slow corners, the tyres had to managed very carefully around a qualifying lap. Since the number of slow corners was reduced, that’s become less of a factor, and the rear tyres arrive in the final sector in better condition – but it’s still a bit of a thing.

While we don’t need to do the same amount of tyre saving to make sure we have a healthy rear-end, we need to understand properly what we can do. We still need good traction out of T12 and through the hotel and good tyres to make sure you don’t lose the rear out of the final corner. We’ll still need to understand overheating. It won’t be as extreme as on the old layout – but it will still be there.

For the race, strategy is very interesting. Last year, no-one was really sure if the race would be one or two stops, and most teams hedged their bets with one car on either strategy. We’ll want to find out across practice if it’s still that close or if it has changed.

Our pre-event numbers and learning across the season suggest it’s still going to be very close, but we’ll know more once we’ve done some runs and got a read on the real-world condition of the tyres. There might be an optimum strategy – or at the end of today we might still think there’s nothing to separate the strategies. At that point, we need to be sure we have a good plan for the race and how to deploy one, or the other, or have a plan to adapt, depending on the circumstances and race scenarios that we find.

Last year, we saw the Soft tyre wasn’t very raceable and the main tyres were the Medium and the Hard – though even the Medium struggled quite a lot with graining. It will be a priority to understand those tyres, and understand how many sets of each you want to retain for the race.

Deciding on downforce levels

Downforce levels are also still a question we need to answer. Our aero-scan came up with two different options that are very close on lap-time. The long power-limited sections make the Yas Marina Circuit a trade-off in terms of where you produce the lap-time: add a little more downforce, go quicker through the corners; take off some downforce and produce the lap-time on the straights.

With this in mind we’re – potentially – going to be looking at two rear wings. The first option is a high downforce wing, that we’ve been using recently, but we also want to look at another option, which is a step down from the first option – you could characterize it as Medium-High. We’ll experiment with these options and move our drag level around to see which performs best in real conditions. This, essentially, is the same choice we had going into the weekend at Suzuka – though the lap-time difference here is much closer.

We’ll start both cars on higher downforce option but potentially through Friday we might see that drag level dropping to another option to check stability and the competitiveness of the car with that lower downforce and lower drag. That said,  it’s worth noting that with these cars, the downforce level and the drag level is not only about the top element. It’s also about the beam wing mounted below. That makes the picture a little more complex to understanding the best combination of wings.

Getting a head start on 2024

Finally, you’ll see both cars fitted with aero rakes at the start of FP1. This might be the final race weekend for the MCL60 – but we’re still learning plenty about this car, which will hopefully help us get off to a flying start next year. It really isn’t that far away!

Briefing complete. Time for Lando and Oscar to head out onto the track and put our hard work to the test.