With 22 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 British Grand Prix to its fullest.

Silverstone is one of the oldest, most popular, and well-known circuits on the calendar, and for our British audience, it’s the one they’re most likely to have visited, but that doesn’t mean that everyone will know the technicalities of the track. You don’t need to be an engineering guru to enjoy F1, that’s where Jose Manuel Lopez comes in.

In partnership with Google Chrome, he’s leading this weekend’s engineering brief and he’ll explain what we can expect from our upgrades at Silverstone and the rigorous testing it will be undergoing throughout the practice sessions, which includes performance around Silverstone’s slower-speed corners. Jose will also touch upon tyre choice, our selection of rear-wing and the number of pit-stops we’ll be opting for at Silverstone.

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: British Grand Prix
Circuit: Silverstone

Testing out our upgrades

As you know, we introduced a new aero package in Austria but because that was a Sprint event, with just a single hour of practice, we weren’t able to maximise our learning from it. We’ll get a much better opportunity to do that today, across the two Friday practice sessions.

Having data from the Sprint and race in Austria is useful, and the car certainly went well there – but we’re a data-driven organisation and can’t let the emotion of a good result get in the way of process. Historically, the car has been good in Austria, and Lando in particular goes well at the Red Bull Ring.

We think the aero update was performing as expected but we need to stay grounded and confirm this package is working across a range of circuits and corner types. We know the MCL60 likes higher-speed sections of track – what we really want to find out is how it does in the lower-speed sections here – particularly through the Arena and Brooklands/Luffield.

In Austria, only one set of parts was available, which Lando used. This weekend, the second set has been completed so Oscar will get his first run with the new kit. He’ll be starting the first session with a series of aero runs.

We have a new front wing here and at some point during the weekend, Lando is going to do some aero work with that. In effect, this will mean Oscar is running the ‘new’ baseline car against which the new front wing will be evaluated.

This is all very important because we weren’t able to collect aero data in Austria – we had to use all of our time to work on set-up for the weekend – but updating our knowledge on measured aero loads and aero performance on track really is vital for developing the MCL60. We can’t, however, do that at the expense of the work we need to do to maximise our performance here at Silverstone.

We’ll be conducting set-up experiments

Alongside the aero tests, we’ll be doing the usual range of set-up experiments, which here will involve playing with the lateral balance, looking at rear and front ride heights, understanding where we want to put the aero-balance of the car, and things like that. There’s quite a bit to learn, and we’ll hope to get some good high-fuel, long-running done, because that’s the primary thing we lacked in Austria.

Learning about the tyres

We’ve also got a lot of learning to do on the tyres, which are a new construction this weekend. We have the same C1, C2, C3 compounds as we’ve used before this season, but the construction of the tyre has been upgraded to better meet the huge loads going through the tyres this year.

We tested C1 sets of these tyres during Friday practice in Barcelona, and based on that, we’re expecting the behaviour to be very similar. Or, at least, the behaviour was very similar in Barcelona and we’re reasonably confident the same will be true here – but we’d like to be more than ‘reasonably confident’, and so we’ll do the work today to make sure we’re in good shape. This will keep us busy.

How many pit-stops will we need to make?

Last year, this was nominally a two-stop race but heavily influenced by a late race Safety Car. The data points more towards one-stop but we’ll want to learn more about that across practice.

The choice of rear-wing

Regarding downforce, we’ll have the same medium downforce rear wing we introduced in Canada and ran in Austria. In Austria, it was a tough decision between that wing and the higher downforce wing introduced in Bahrain. It’s a more straightforward decision here but we will be looking at various sizes of Gurney, so expect to see the car crews working on the rear wing between runs. Busy sessions today!

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.