With 23 circuits, there can be a lot to take in, so we’ve organised for you to join us in Lando and Oscar’s engineering briefings, where we’ll walk you through this weekend’s key trackside topics so that you can enjoy the Belgian Grand Prix to its fullest.

At 7.004km, the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps is a long lap with a variety of different challenges. Along their way around, drivers will tackle high and low-speed corners, elevation changes, long flowing straights, and tight twisting turns. That makes setting up a car particularly tricky at Spa, with engineers needing to make a choice between low and high downforce.

The likelihood of rain will both figuratively and literally muddy the waters, as does the F1 Sprint, which will take place in Belgium. In partnership with Google Chrome, Will Joseph will lead this weekend’s engineering briefing, where he’ll be explaining why the team have to make these decisions and the impact their choices could have on the sessions.

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: Will Joseph
Event: Belgian Grand Prix
Circuit: Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps

The challenges posed by the F1 Sprint

Having a Sprint weekend at Spa-Francorchamps is a tricky proposition. The Circuit has some unique features that we would usually seek to understand and dial-in across the weekend. Making those decisions across just an hour of practice is a further challenge. Teams that cope better with that challenge will prosper – so it’s also an opportunity.

The lap is very long at Spa, which of course makes that the one practice session very tight. We will want to be on-track as much as possible – but we will also have items to tick off the programme and need to come back to the garage and make set-up changes, but there won’t be much time to get those done.

So, how do you fit all of your testing into just one practice session?

The way to do as much work as we can is to split the tests across the two cars, testing two levels of downforce with a quite big step between them. This will allow us to validate our simulations but also help us understand what other people are doing as well. 

Usually, when we put the cars on different programmes in FP1, the idea is that we’ll understand after the session which works best and bring them together into one spec for FP2. Obviously here we don’t have FP2, but more than that, Spa is one of the circuits where, even on a normal race weekend, it’s perfectly possible for the drivers to have a difference of opinion and go in different set-up directions.

It looks like rain… Will the weather play a part this weekend?

Having said that, rain changes everything and the forecast isn’t good – but being Spa anything could happen at any given time. The big problem if we have a wet practice session is figuring out set-up for the big compression at Eau Rouge. You can ground the car there, and one of the things we would do in a normal weekend is understand how low we can run the car– or by how much we have to lift it to get through.

If the session is wet, that becomes very challenging – because the Inter tyre is of a different size to the slicks. If the forecast is likely to be different across Qualifying, Shootout, Sprint and Race than that will be tough, and will provide some headaches.

Downforce level is much the same: if we run higher downforce on both cars because of a wet track, then we have to rely on our pre-weekend work and simulations to decide where to put the car for the rest of the weekend. Complicated!

Do we have any further upgrades?

We don’t have any genuine upgrades here, but we will be bringing components suitable for the low-downforce nature of Spa, and so there will be a couple of new bits on the car. We’ll be working through a programme to see which of those are most suitable for the sort of race we expect to see.

This isn’t just a question of fitting different sizes of rear wing. We have a suite of different beam wing options, different endplates, different flaps. There are many different combinations we could use, and we’ll be trying to find the most efficient variations for any given downforce level.

Explaining downforce requirements at Spa-Francorchamps

Looking at last year, the two cars went into qualifying with different downforce levels. Lando ran low downforce with our Monza-spec rear wing – and we came out of that weekend with the impression that it was too low, and we were struggling too much with traction. The other car ran with higher levels of downforce.

There is a trade-off to understand: With more downforce you will struggle with speed at end-of-straight [EOS] but you’ll get a better exit out of several of the corners. There’s lots of ways of looking at which of these is better.

Overtaking at Spa-Francorchamps

We often find the quickest way to overtake cars is just to have the quickest car we can for overall lap-time, rather than chasing EOS speed – but having said that, at Spa, it’s a long, long way up the Kemmel Straight and it’s a long way back down around Blanchimont. If you’re low in EOS speed compared to the pack, then you can often find yourself to be exposed in those areas. Under those circumstances, you might decide to drop some downforce to gain top-end speed, particularly if you think you’re a little too easy through some of the quicker corners.

It isn’t always straightforward. Overtaking into T5 [Les Combes] is all about getting a good exit from T1 [La Source], so you have to pay attention to low-speed traction, so setting up your car to help in those low-speed sections will be just as important to overtaking as choosing the right downforce level.

Do you practice towing?

We might want to practice towing. In the past, this has been a circuit where there’s been gains to be made on a qualifying lap by having one car tow the other. It’s particularly useful when one of the cars is taking an engine penalty, and can take the hit without harm to help the other. With two competitive cars, it’s a little trickier – but still doable.

We haven’t made a final decision on this yet and are pretty open-minded, depending on what we think the weather might do, how competitive the cars look and what the input from the drivers will be. It’s one of those things we’ll be having a conversation about as the session proceeds.

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