Formula 1 is full of complex lingo and circuit-specific narratives that can confuse and baffle the occasional viewer or new fan. Why is the Hungarian Grand Prix known for its quali bias? What makes the Singapore Grand Prix the most physically challenging race? And why do teams take different rear wings for the Monaco Grand Prix?

With 23 circuits, there can be a lot to take in, so in partnership with Google Chrome, 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 Monaco Grand Prix to its fullest.

Monaco is one of the most hotly anticipated races on the calendar. You’ll see a lot of glamour, a lot of famous faces and a lot of close calls with the barriers, but you’ll not see a lot of overtaking, so why is it so beloved?

Largely, because it provides such a unique array of challenges. Its lack of width may not promote wheel to wheel racing, but it does require a level of pinpoint precision that no other track on the calendar can match. It’s a circuit where a driver can really make the difference.

Will Joseph is leading this weekend’s engineering briefing and will look to explain this and more. 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: Monaco Grand Prix
Circuit: Circuit de Monaco 

Background

This weekend, the focus is firmly on this weekend. Many of the longer-term experiments that we had planned for Imola are not suitable for Monaco and so have been pushed back to Spain. This isn’t a circuit, for example, to run in FP1 with aero rakes fitted – there are too many walls, too many bumps and plenty of other complications.

It’s also the case that we’re working in a very tight garage. There’s never enough space, always something going on, and we arrive with the expectation that it’s going to be very difficult and everyone’s going to be in each other’s way. Somehow, we always muddle through and manage to get on with it – but it’s not a race where we need to add-in extra complications. This weekend the emphasis is on familiarising the drivers with the track. That has to be the focus.

Monaco-specific rear-wings

We will be running maximum downforce this weekend – although not with a new package. Instead, we’ve repackaged last year’s high downforce rear wing, with endplates and the beam wing we introduced at the start of the year, reworked for this wing. There will be a new suite later in the season but for the moment, the new realities of F1 mean we do the best we can with what we have.

Given Monaco’s unique nature, there aren’t many debates to be had over downforce level. The aero scans say we should run all the downforce we have, so that’s what we do. It doesn’t mean that we won’t experiment, however. We have some rear brake duct winglets to take a look at this weekend – but they’re less about absolute downforce and more about where we put load into the car around the lap.

Going into the weekend not having to think too much about downforce level does, to a certain extent, make our weekend more straightforward – but the reality is that it frees you up to worry about other things!

The circuit requires a unique set-up

The lack of any sort of straight, and no high-speed corners, makes this a strange circuit for set-up. We can run the car soft but also with the rear-ride height quite low because the car won’t have that high-speed compression. 

Linked to that, we’ll want to investigate the new tarmac that has been laid around the pit-straight and tunnel sections of the track. As we try to dial-in the set-up, it’s always interesting to see if the new surface is smoother, what affect that has on track grip, and if the transitions between the old and new surface are bumpy etc. Lando’s already had a look – but you can’t really tell without driving over it in the MCL60.

The importance of track time

This circuit is one that rewards driver confidence and rewards a driver that can position the car close to the walls. The hope is that we arrive with a good baseline set-up, which allows the drivers to get on with it and dial themselves in. It’s often the case in Monaco that there’s more lap-time to be found is leaving the driver to it, rather than trying to drag the last tenth out of the car with a tweak to aero or rear ride height, or lateral balance.

With 60-minute sessions, however, we can’t really give them a programme that caters for that. We are generally time-limited, more than anything else. They do naturally get more laps in Monaco, because the laps don’t take very long to complete around here – but we still have to do garage turnarounds, fuel, tyres, debrief etc, so the time spent in the garage is similar to elsewhere – but if the opportunity arises to squeeze in a couple more laps, we’ll take it, and the drivers will appreciate the extra time on track.

How and why we keep the car cool

The cooling package is interesting also. Obviously, this is a race where you’re often running in traffic, and that will spike temperatures. You can’t particularly make decisions in advance without knowing the ambient temperatures – but we’ll hope to gradually close-up the car if we can, because any chance we have to reduce cooling will also reduce drag. To do that we’ll certainly want to do some running in traffic – though it’s rarely difficult to find that here.

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.