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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 São Paulo Grand Prix to its fullest. 

Having now held three consecutive Sprint formats in Brazil, it’s hard to remember what life was like at the Autódromo José Carlos Pace with more than one practice session, meaning we’ve become pretty good at squeezing a lot into a short space of time.  

This weekend, in addition to getting Oscar up to speed with another new circuit, the team will be focusing heavily on tyres, and the impact of São Paulo’s fluctuating and unpredictable weather conditions. Henry Fidler will be leading this weekend’s briefing, in partnership with Google Chrome, where he’ll look to explain all of that 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: Henry Fidler
Event: São Paulo Grand Prix
Circuit: Autódromo José Carlos Pace

Why the Sprint format is feeling like the new normal

We are back with the Sprint format this weekend, and given there have been two of these in the last three races, this almost feels like the ‘normal’ weekend at the moment. It does, of course, mean we have just the one practice session before the cars are fixed in their final specification and go into parc fermé conditions.

While we’re very familiar with the format now, we’re less familiar with Autódromo José Carlos Pace. This event was a Sprint in 2021 and 2022, and there was no race in 2020 – so we don’t have a huge amount of familiarity from testing set-up options here. There just hasn’t been an opportunity. This makes the challenge a little different to the one faced two weeks ago at COTA, when this triple-header began.

Last weekend, in Mexico, we started the cars in different specs, experimenting with our cooling options. That’s not on the agenda this weekend. With only one practice session at Interlagos, and with Oscar never having been here before, it’ll be important for him, in terms of his references through FP1, to have a car that provides a good comparison to Lando. That will help him learn how to get the most out of the car on a circuit that’s quite difficult.

Interlagos is no longer a maximum downforce track

Before 2022, Interlagos was a maximum downforce track, but with this new generation of cars, we weren’t quite at maximum downforce last year. I suspect this weekend we’ll be a little below maximum again, with a package similar to what we used at Suzuka. The way these cars work, that will be the same maximum downforce rear wing we used last weekend, but with a lower gurney and perhaps a different beam wing to take some load out and make us more efficient on the straights.

But Interlagos is still a bumpy circuit, despite a resurfacing

Interlagos was resurfaced a few years ago but it’s still quite a bumpy circuit – and it’s also a very three-dimensional track, with a lot of warp and camber as it winds up and down the hillside. There’s a lot of combined entry corners and combined exits, and a lot of time spend with lateral load in the car. It’ll be our job in this session to use all of our set-up options to ensure we can keep all four tyres on the ground as much as possible, and to find ways to avoid front-locking and issues with traction. It means a softer car than we’ll have run recently – but this is something quite challenging to get right.

Tyre choice and management

We’re keen, as always, to learn about our tyres. In the past, we’ve been reticent to use a set of Soft tyres during the practice session, preferring to keep them all for qualifying. Now that we’re a little more competitive, that may change. We’re inclined to think that perhaps we don’t need to use four sets across Q1 and Q2, and might learn more by running a Soft now.

Something that’s proved tricky this year is managing the transition in the Shootout from the Medium – which has to be used in SQ1 and SQ2 – to the Soft for SQ3. There’s a lap-time change when you go from Medium to Soft but also a car balance and performance change. Understanding how to get the best out of the Soft is something that we might like to learn a little more about, and running Medium and Soft in the practice session would allow us to do that.

…On the other hand, there’s a premium on using the Soft tyres to make sure we get into Q3 and have a robust weekend. We don’t want to be in a situation like we had in Mexico, where Lando had to battle from the back to get into a good position by the end of the race – exciting as it was.

Some of our decisions on tyre usage may depend on what sort of a race we’re expecting. Last year was a two-stop race, and this year we have the same tyres, so it’s likely to be a two-stop race again – but Interlagos is very dependent on the weather. Not just the potential for rain but also the variations in track temperature.

Track temperature will impact how the tyres degrade, and even affect things like whether this is a front-limited or rear-limited track. We’ll need to gather good data from this session and use that with our models and the weather forecast for the weekend to come up with what we think might be the best approach. Of course, if this session is wet, we’ll be relying on models and prior experience to decide the set-up we’re taking forward.

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