
The Chinese GP Briefing - powered by Google Cloud
The impact of a new format and a new-ish circuit: Breaking down this weekend’s key themes

Welcome to The Briefing, where you can get a jumpstart on the Chinese 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, powered by Google Cloud, we spoke to Cédric Michel-Grosjean, where we discussed the impact of the new-look Sprint format and the changes that came with this, which are more significant than they appear at first glance. We also addressed the fact that this is our first visit to China since 2019, with neither driver being hugely familiar with the Shanghai International Circuit. Here’s what you need to know…

1. The new Sprint format will impact our preparation
Our first Sprint weekend of the year, with the sessions reordered. Practice on Friday morning, Sprint Quali in the afternoon, Sprint Saturday morning, Qualifying for the Grand Prix Saturday afternoon and that, as usual, on Sunday. This is very different.
A significant change – perhaps not being reported as much as the timetable shift – is that parc fermé will now reopen after the Sprint on Saturday, ahead of Qualifying. This means we’ll be able to change the set-up before Qualifying in the same way we would on a normal weekend.
This changes the perspective of the whole weekend. Ride-height, for example, for skids and planks. This should prevent a repeat of last year at the Sprint weekend in Austin, when we saw teams disqualified, having had to do all four sessions from Friday afternoon to the race on a single set of skids and planks.
You can also change other things, but there isn’t a strategic element to this: if we nail the set-up for the Sprint, there isn’t really a change we’d then want to make for the longer race – but we’ll be gathering data all the time, and many things can change. It just means more flexibility.
Another change is the introduction of a curfew on Friday night, which while standard practice on a regular Grand Prix weekend, wasn’t previously the case during Sprint weekends. This limits the time at the track for mechanics and engineers. It will have a smaller impact on the mechanics, as they already had a ‘covers-on’ time at which they had to stop working on the car – but for the engineering team, it’s a big change: limited time to review Sprint Qualifying and limited time to prepare for the Sprint. It's a different perspective on the weekend, and an adjustment to the workload.

2. We are treating the Shanghai International Circuit like a new track
Not having been here for five years is significant, but more than the time gap is that we haven’t been here with this generation of cars, or this generation of tyres.
There’s been very limited data available. We haven’t seen a LIDAR scan, we don’t have a full profile of the bumps. There have been a few changes since we were last here, with sausage kerbs removed, repair work done and the track milled flat in places. We’ve had a walk around and seen these things – but the real test will be FP1.
Oscar’s never been here, but even very experienced drivers are going to be wary of how to approach this weekend with it being a Sprint – especially with no real opportunity to learn about high-fuel performance until the race on Sunday.

3. Priortising in practice will be key
The priority in practice will be car set-up items for stiffness and ride-heights. We don’t know how those bumps have evolved, we don’t know how the grip-level has evolved. Likely, we’ll do shorter runs, come back in the garage, review the data, make changes, and go again. Even though there’s an opportunity to change it again after the Sprint, we want to be competitive in the first part of the weekend.
The straights here are very long – but the corners are very long too: you spend a lot of time in those and, despite those straights, the amount of time at full throttle is actually quite low compared to the places we’ve been recently. This pushes you to want quite high downforce – especially if the grip proves to be low and tyre degradation is high. On the other hand, drivers may be worried about end-of-straight speed, so it’s not a straightforward decision.

Find your competitive edge with Google Cloud
4. What to expect from the tyres
Regarding tyres, the Sprint format gives us 12 sets of slicks: two Hard, four Medium, six Soft. We’ve become accustomed to this over the last couple of years, but reordering the sessions alters the choices you have to make. Added to this, the Chinese Grand Prix has tended to be a two-stop, which will further complicate our decision-making.
With only two sets, it makes it very difficult to use them wisely. Would you keep two new sets for the race and go into it without any information, or would you investigate during practice and potentially have to run a used set on Sunday? One of many tricky questions to answer.
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.