Welcome to The Briefing, where you can get a jumpstart on the Austrian Grand Prix with our guide to the key topics.

Every race weekend, we’ll speak to one of our engineers to discuss the key talking points ahead of the upcoming Grand Prix and simplify them so that you can dive straight into the action with a better idea of what to expect and what you should be looking out for.  

This week, in partnership with Google Cloud, we spoke to Cédric Michel-Grosjean. It’s a Sprint event this weekend, so we had a lot of testing to fit into just one practice session. That work included selecting our rear wing, working out how low we can run the MCL38 and making plans for how to tackle Austria’s altitude. Here, we'll explain what was covered and how it will impact us. 

1. A Sprint event gives us less time to collect data

We’re back on the Sprint programme this week. We haven’t had a Sprint event for almost two months, and that feels like a very long time. So, we just have the one practice session this weekend before the competitive sessions begin. It means the number of data points we can collect is severely limited.

Having just a single hour of practice makes the programme streamlined and fairly straightforward. We will be starting the session with the car in something close to what we think will be the setup we take forward into the competitive sessions.

2. How low can we run the MCL38?

The main thing we’re interested in is how low we can run the car. The Red Bull Ring has a few places where the car will be grounding. Turn 9 is very high speed, which will have the car bouncing, while Turn 10 features a dip where the car grounds at as well.

There’s a big bump on the straight between Turn 1 and Turn 3, where MotoGP has a chicane. It’s been resurfaced and isn’t very smooth. It’s power limited – but it’s harsh for the drivers and has implications for legality wear. That’s less of a concern this year as the reworked Sprint weekend rules will allow us to change parts after the Sprint, and before Qualifying.

This circuit also features a lot of elevation change, which leads to some quite severe track warp, particularly at Turn 3. This can affect how you set-up your car for roll stiffness.

The second-half of this lap – basically from Turn 6 onwards – features high-speed corners from which you will gain a benefit from setting the car up with high roll stiffnesses, but that will affect your performance in Turn 3 where the rear right will unload as you come over the apex kerb.

There might be a little bit of compromise to be made there – but it’s also the case that whatever you do, the car is likely to be three-wheeling in Turn 3. A lot of dealing with that is in the driving approach: delaying the throttle pick-up while the wheel is in the air and putting the power down when the tyre hits the surface again.

There are different lines, but the variability has shrunk from where it was a few years ago. Now everyone aims for the apex kerb before the sausage kerb. It’s something for the drivers to practice.

3. The impact of racing at altitude

We’re also at altitude this weekend for the first time this year. We tend not to talk about altitude too much anymore unless we’re in Mexico because the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez overshadows every other circuit. Austria isn’t as extreme as that, but we’re still up at 700m, and air density is lower than at sea level. This needs to be taken into account when making cooling decisions.

Cooling can be critical here – not just because there’s less air available but also because you’re inevitably going to spend a lot of the race in traffic. The lap is very short, and even if you have a car quick enough to avoid being mired in trains, you’re always going to be catching backmarkers, which means it’s very rare to have the car running in clear air for any extended length of time.

With the three long straights here, there’s a real temptation to close the car up to be more efficient, but you have to be mindful of this dirty air when you’re making cooling decisions. Again, you can make changes to the cooling setup after the Sprint – but really, you only have this one practice session to investigate properly.

4. Selecting which rear wing to run

We’re going into the weekend expecting to run the medium-low downforce rear wing introduced back in Bahrain – but from our scans, there’s several wings with a little more downforce that are very, very close in Qualifying and even in the race.

In that situation, the standard approach is to run with less. While this is likely a two-stop race, tyre saving still comes into play through the high-speed sections of the track, which means those corners aren’t grip-limited anymore, and carrying a bigger wing won’t bring you an advantage.

So, usually we lean in the direction of a wing that’s going to make the car quick on the three consecutive straights. They all have DRS, are all overtaking points, and if you’re slow on the straights, you’re going to be vulnerable. There isn’t really time to experiment this weekend – but we will want to see what everyone else is doing, just to make sure we’re in the same ballpark.

McLaren Racing leverages Google Cloud AI to gain a competitive edge by visualising race data to provide real-time insights, and creating efficiencies across processes and resources.