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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 United States Grand Prix to its fullest.  

From a performance point of view, we’ve had a good idea of what to expect from the upgraded MCL60 over the last few rounds, but this weekend is something of an unknown, with plenty of intrigue around how it will react to the Circuit of the Americas – not least because the track changes, but more on that below.  

That’s precisely why we’ve got to trust our preparation. COTA is known for its low-speed corners and bumpy track surface and presents a different challenge to the previous few tracks we’ve raced on. We’ve got another F1 Sprint to contend with this weekend, which means a decrease in our pre-race programme, with only one free practice session.  

For both us and you, prioritisation will be key, and that’s where our engineering briefing comes into play. Will Joseph will be leading this weekend’s meeting, in partnership with Google Chrome, where he’ll explain what you can expect from this weekend’s US Grand Prix.   

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: United States Grand Prix
Circuit: Circuit of the Americas

Why there is an element of the unknown

This is an interesting race weekend for us. If you looked at the last six races on the calendar then, on paper, Qatar was likely to be our strongest track. How we go here at COTA is something of an unknown. There’s quite a lot of low-speed corners, which hasn’t been a strength and it’s very bumpy. When a track is bumpy, we have to run the car soft, and the MCL60 hasn’t been as competitive when it’s running soft as when it’s running stiff.

That said, we haven’t been to a circuit like this since introducing the Singapore upgrade, so we just don’t know if that upgrade has made us more competitive at a bumpy circuit. We did OK in Singapore – and we’re intrigued to find out what that means here.

One of the quirks of COTA is that the track changes. Bumps appear, the track authorities try to deal with them, new bumps appear. It does mean the surface is a little bit of a patchwork. Ultimately, it’s a track built on a soft surface, so it’s never going to be perfect – so finding out how stiff we can run the car is a big issue.

Prioritising the fundamentals over fine details

Being a Sprint weekend, we have just the one practice session at COTA. From an engineering perspective, there are pros and cons to that. With the standard three sessions, you get to improve the car gradually, up to the point where you fix the specification before qualifying. At Sprint weekends, you have to reach that end-point a lot more quickly. It’s quite the challenge.

It means you rely a lot more on your pre-event preparation, and you prioritise the big-ticket items. You’re thinking about fundamentals rather than the finer details: just the elements that are crucial to get the car into the right space for qualifying and the race.

At any race weekend, you prioritise what you think are likely to be the biggest issues and decide which tools are best suited to addressing them. The normal approach would be to study issues in isolation – making one change to the car and seeing what that does. On a Sprint weekend it has to be more condensed – so it might be that we’ll make three changes at once, in the hope of having the quickest car possible, immediately. The engineers have a lot of data to process and a lot of decisions to make in a short amount of time – because the specification for the rest of the weekend is fixed the moment the car roles out in Q1, two-and-a-half hours after FP1 finishes.

This isn’t quite as challenging in COTA as it was at the Sprint in Austria, where we were introducing a significant upgrade. At the Red Bull Ring our thinking was mostly about making sure the car would survive the weekend, rather than working to optimise it – but now we’ve got a model for how this upgrade works. For example, we know what our cooling options are. We still have to sign-off a cooling package – and you’d look pretty silly if you arrived at the race with a car that didn’t have enough cooling – but it’s less of a concern with a good model in your back pocket.

Will there be any difference between the cars?

At previous Sprint events, we’ve split the cars for FP1 onto different specification – but here the cars are likely to be very similar. When you split the cars, it’s because there are questions that you want to answer. It delivers more data – but at the cost of giving one of the drivers a car that you think might be less good for the one and only practice session. That’s not too bad an option if you can bring the cars together mid-session – but if you continue with them in a different place, it means one driver won’t get to run the preferred spec until Q1.

That’s not our plan here. We’ll have very similar cars and be trying to find the ultimate pace in what we’ve got. Given this is a new track for Oscar, he’ll have some track learning to do, and having a car in a similar space to Lando will be one less thing for him to think about.

We’ll be running the same aerodynamic spec as what we had in Qatar, basically our maximum downforce car. We might play around with the Gurney flaps but otherwise there isn’t much we’ll change.

Understanding tyre behaviour

We have the same tyres as last year – but different track temperatures can have a massive impact on how tyres behave – and the temperatures are different this year. We’ll have important decisions to make on which tyres to take forward, and given the limited about of information we’ll be able to gather, that’s a tricky challenge. We’ll be relying on the experience of Hiroshi [Imai – chief engineer Director, Race Engineering and tyre expert] and the tyre group to put the pieces together.

They, with the assistance of the strategy group, will have a range of tyre models, and, going through FP1, we’ll see if the tyres are behaving as expected, or if they’re deviating from our expectations – and, if so, if they’re deviating in a manner that fits into one of the models we’ve already considered.

You’ve got to trust your preparation

Hopefully, we’ve done enough preparation in advance that nothing is a surprise, and we’re choosing which pre-determined path to go down. The reality though, is that it's never that simple! I suspect we’ll see different tyres used up and down the pit-lane in FP1, and everyone will be trying to extrapolate from that what other teams’ models are suggesting.

Sometimes this gives you a little extra-confidence, sometimes it makes you wonder if you’re out of step with the mainstream. The key thing is trusting in your preparation and your understanding. Given the short amount of time for practice, you don’t really have other options.

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