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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 and Oscar’s engineering briefings, where we’ll walk you through this weekend’s key trackside topics so that you can enjoy the Italian Grand Prix to its fullest.

The high-speed, full-throttle Autodromo Nazionale Monza is made for overtaking, so we should be able to have some fun this weekend, but only if we get our set-up right. Henry Fidler has joined us for this weekend’s engineering briefing, in partnership with Google Chrome, and he’ll look to explain the choices that we have in front of us and how we’ll be making them.  

Most importantly, this includes our selection of rear-wing and the level of downforce we run with, but also our suspension set-up as we look to navigate Monza’s bumpy track surface. Henry will also explain the tow and how Lando and Oscar can work together to utilise it in qualifying.  

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: Henry Fidler   
Event: Italian Grand Prix 
Circuit: Autodromo Nazionale Monza

Explaining the downforce trade-off and how we will approach this

We have a new rear wing assembly for Monza, which is an upgrade on the low downforce rear wing we’ve had at previous races. This one carries over some of the learning from our more recent upgrades and applies them to a low downforce specification.

Like Spa, Monza is a track where it’s not too difficult to overtake and end-of-straight speed is important for race-ability, simply because the start-finish straight is very long. If you find yourself out-of-bed, in comparison to the straight-line speed other cars have, then you can end up going backwards very quickly, even if your overall lap-time is competitive.

It isn’t just a case of taking off all the wing. The final corner – Parabolica – is very long, and high-speed, and because of that it’s probably the most downforce-sensitive corner on the track. You benefit through there by carrying a bit more downforce, and if you have the car pace, that will give you the margin on the main straight to attack or defend against a car with better straight-line speed – but it’s a tricky trade to get right, and given how tight the field is now, with three or four teams often within a tenth of a second, there’s risk of a painful mistake.

With that in mind, we’ll split the rear wing levels in practice across the two cars. We’ll use slightly different levels of downforce with the new wing, but perhaps also try the new rear wing versus our older low-downforce wing, running them at similar drag levels to understand which is the more efficient.

While much of the Dutch Grand Prix was wet, we had dry running on Friday and were able to catch-up with some of our aero experiments, so we don’t have a huge backlog here, for what looks like being a rare, completely dry weekend. That’s going to allow us to concentrate mostly on the rear wing – but we will have some rake-running at the start of the session to test some other new components around the front-end of the car. We’ll split those components across the two cars as well.

Tyre performance and the impact of the Alternative Tyre Allocation

Rear wing apart, we are, as always, very interested in tyre performance. This year we have the C3, C4 and C5 compounds at Monza, and this is new. We’ve never had Pirelli’s softest tyres at this track – last year it was the C2, C3 and C4 – and so the first task is to learn if the C5 is a robust tyre for racing, or if it’s something we simply want to use in qualifying.

A huge factor this weekend is that we’re running with the Alternative Tyre Allocation (ATA). Another big learning point to understand is how to get the most out of the Hard tyre in Q1, and then how to help the drivers progress through each session, getting lap time out of the different tyre compounds. There will be big steps, particularly between Q1 and Q2, given the track improvement you usually see here, plus the tyre delta between Hard and Medium.

Therefore, one consideration for our practice run programme has to be how we help the drivers maximise what they’ve got on a first lap, and not have to do multiple laps on the same run, or more runs than they would ideally choose to do.

Each compound of tyre has to be prepped slightly differently, and it’s a real challenge on the harder compounds. One consideration is getting the right front tyre up to temperature, because many of the corners are right-handers, and going into Turn 1 – one of the biggest braking zones of the year – there’s a good chance of locking-up that right front if it isn’t prepped correctly.

How many sets of tyres we use across the three practice sessions is a really good question. The ideal scenario at any grand prix is that you’d save only new tyres for qualifying and the race, taking forward nothing you’re used in practice. That’s less straightforward when you only have 11 slick sets, with the ATA, four of which have to be handed back to Pirelli before qualifying.

In Hungary, at the last ATA event, we had a wet FP1, which meant we didn’t have this problem, and thus aren’t sure if everyone will share the same approach. There may be some teams who want to mimimise their tyre use in practice to have only new tyres for the race and quali, while other teams will want to learn a bit more in practice and are prepared to carry some used tyres forward.

It will depend on the trade-off between what your expectations are for used tyre performance, and what you think the lap-time penalty would be for either qualifying or racing on a used set. There’s a little more wiggle room at Monza because the race is likely to be one-stop, whereas Hungary was always likely to be two or three stops.

Utilising the power of the tow in Monza

Another consideration for Monza is the value of towing. Having team-mates tow each other around a qualifying lap, particularly in Q3, brings a good benefit, mainly because it avoids being dragged into the game of chicken to see who can be last to leave the pit-lane, and the queuing chaos we often see at Monza. If you can get a tow, you don’t have to risk either car missing their timed lap, or not optimising it because they’ve been too slow to beat the flag, or had to go too fast, on their out-lap to make it.

It may be that we don’t use a tow in qualifying, but it’s certainly something to discuss, prepare for, and practice. Practice will make the drivers comfortable doing it – I don’t think Lando has towed Oscar or Oscar has towed anyone before. Certainly, it needs practice and coordination across the two sides of the garage – but get it right, it could be a really good benefit.

Optimising our setup to avoid the DRS train

Other things we’re interested in learning in practice concern PU cooling and suspension setup. We do expect the ambient temperatures to be high this weekend and cooling will be a factor. We’ve seen other teams struggle here in recent years when they have been stuck in traffic. While overtaking isn’t difficult, if you get in the middle of a DRS train, those can be hard to get out of, and if you’ve optimised your setup around an assumption of running in clear air, that can be a problem.

For suspension, the issue is bumps and kerbs. Monza is a pretty bumpy circuit, with unsettling bumps in the braking zones for all three chicanes. And the apex kerbs in the first two chicanes have to be used, so there’s a lot of care that has to be taken with getting our stiffnesses right, giving the drivers confidence in the braking zones, and allowing them to straighten the chicanes. This is traded-off against our usual preference to run the car as stiff as possible for the aero platform. At most circuits, we want to be as stiff as possible: here, we might accept something a little softer – because Monza asks different questions to many places we go.

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.