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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 Singapore Grand Prix to its fullest.

There’s plenty of work to be getting on with in Singapore. Our final big upgrade package of the 2023 season has been initially installed on Lando’s car ahead of Oscar getting his hands on it in Japan, and we’ll be testing that out for the first time in the practice sessions.  

The Marina Bay Street Circuit is a complete unknown to Oscar, so a large amount of his practice will be focused on getting up to speed. No matter how many miles he clocks up on the simulator, nothing quite compares to punching in laps.

It won’t be entirely familiar to Lando either, though, with Turns 16 to 19 being removed and replaced by a new 397.9m straight, due to redevelopment work in the vicinity of the track. A section of the circuit has also been resurfaced, meaning the lumps and bumps he’d become accustomed to are likely to have changed in that particular part of the track. In partnership with Google Chrome, Adrian Goodwin will lead this weekend’s engineering briefing, where he’ll be explaining the impact of the above 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: Adrian Goodwin
Event: Singapore Grand Prix
Circuit: Marina Bay Street Circuit

Knowing what to prioritise is tricky in Singapore

It’s tough in Singapore to name our priority in practice because everything tends to be crucial – and this year, there’s more boxes to tick than usual. We need to get our cooling package just right: too little, and we’ll have problems in the race. Too generous, and we’ll be slow. We need to understand the tyres, and particularly whether the C5 will be useful as a race tyre: we need to understand the upgrades we have here, and we need to understand a very substantial change to the circuit layout.

What impact will the track changes have?

Big changes in Singapore this year. We’ve gone from 23 corners to 19 and have an extra straight. What impact will that have? It’s difficult to say at this stage. Let’s say we’re heading into practice with an open mind, keen to learn what we can.

What we can say is that erasing the section of track that was T16-T19 has removed four low-speed corners and made the new T16 – formerly T20 – a much bigger braking zone. That’s inevitably going to shuffle around the brake energy and caliper cooling requirements – in the sense that the higher car speed on the new straight will deliver more cooling, but we’ll put in more energy with the one heavy braking zone. At the moment, we’re not expecting to see a massive difference – but Singapore is tough on brakes and brake cooling, so we don’t need a huge change for it to be significant.

What about the impact on set-up and tyres?

What the track changes won’t do is alter our set-up demands – this is still a maximum downforce circuit – but it may affect overtaking. Having an extra straight won’t make it worse, but it might not make it easier. Finding out will be a key aim on Friday, taking on board what we see in the data, what we observe on other cars and what feedback we get from Lando and Oscar. It will play a role in strategy but also in set-up. If we’re likely to be stuck in a train for much of the race, that has a serious impact on cooling.

Tyres are going to be affected also, particularly in qualifying, and particularly how we prepare them on an out-lap. Usually on the Marina Bay Street Circuit, the tyres are well past their best at the end of a push lap, so part of what we learn across practice for out-lap preparation is figuring out the best compromise and how much we can undershoot the first sector to make sure we still have the tyres in good conditions for the final sector. The rears will be in better shape this year, both without those four corners and also because they’ll get a little bit of recovery on that straight, if they’ve been spun-up a little too much in the traction zones.

That means we might prepare the tyres on the out-lap a little differently, maybe have the drivers push a little harder earlier in the lap and arrive at the new T16 in the same state we would have arrived in previous years. It’s all about making sure we get the maximum out of the tyres across the whole lap.

Testing out our upgrades

We also have a significant upgrade here. While there may be a few more small things to be drip-fed through the garage across the rest of the season, this will be our final big package update. There’s a new floor, bodywork, front wing and beam wing. We’re introducing it the same way we have our previous updates, with Lando getting the package here and Oscar joining him next week in Japan when more parts are available.

It means across practice today and tomorrow, we’ll have Oscar as the baseline spec, allowing us to make observations across the two cars. Broadly, Oscar will be running the package we had available for Zandvoort, with the rear wing he didn’t race there. This is another evolution of the work we’ve been introducing across the summer. At Silverstone, we looked competitive with a car that had more load at higher speeds, this evolution aims to do the same thing at medium and low speed. It’s a pretty big change – you’ll see that in the front wing endplates, the side slats on the floor, and the more exaggerated bodywork.

We won’t learn everything we want to learn about the new package here, and the work will continue across the next few races. Gathering measurement data in Singapore is difficult because the track is very bumpy, which means you tend to gather high-level data without getting into the fine detail.

Oscar will be learning a new circuit

Because Oscar hasn’t raced in Singapore before, it’s tempting to give him a more compliant car for FP1 – but because we’re testing across the cars, we’ll be matching set-ups and starting off with our normal car, based on our understanding of the MCL60 this year, and what we did at the Marina Bay Street Circuit last year. We’ll perhaps bias the underlaying balance of the car a bit towards stability for both drivers however, either with flap adjustments or mechanical balance.

Track evolution here is high as rubber goes down and the racing line cleans up, so we’d be expecting to migrate the balance gradually rearwards throughout the event to follow the conditions and the grip level.

It’s a new circuit for Oscar but also a new layout for Lando, so both drivers are going to need a good number of laps, just to get themselves back up to speed. Driver confidence is always the priority on street circuits, and that comes through track time. One aspect of the upgrade programme we’ve had over the last few months is that we don’t have a huge stockpile of parts. We’ll manage that a little bit today. If it isn’t necessary to run the latest spec of front or rear wing for a particular test, we might use older specs and keep the new parts for Saturday. Even with the drivers being watchful, this is a circuit where things can just happen, outside of your control – so we tend to be prudent.

Ride-height

With the current generation of cars, so much of the performance comes from getting the ride-height low. Getting that dialed-in across two different aero packages will be quite the challenge this year and will require quite a lot of our time. The roads in Singapore have a pronounced crown – in common with many street circuits – which means contact with the floor when the car goes over that crown is an added complication. It isn’t helped by last year’s race being atypical. We had a lot of issues in 2022 at this circuit with porpoising and working within the requirements of the AOM [Aerodynamic Oscillation Metric], and also spent qualifying and much of the race running on a wet track with the Intermediate tyre. We’re going to have to work hard to gain confidence in the numbers we generate, to know we’re in a good place.

Finally, the new section of track isn’t the only new thing to accommodate this year. A large portion of the circuit, from the main straight all the way to T6 has been resurfaced. The bumps that we’ve spent time learning to deal with in the past may not be there. Other bumps may have appeared, the grip levels will have changed. There’s lots to find out today and not just in the new section of the Marina Bay Street Circuit.

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.