Welcome to The Briefing, where you can get a jumpstart on the Dutch 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 Tom Stallard, who walked us through our latest set of upgrades and the testing plan for them at this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix. He also discussed Circuit Zandvoort’s Qualifying bias, the extended pit lane and some of the track’s more unusual features.

Here’s what you need to know…

1. Testing out some shiny new parts

We’ve arrived in Zandvoort with a lot of new parts for the MCL38, specifically a new rear wing, a new floor and new front brake duct scoops. Testing these is our priority today.

Both cars will run the new brake ducts, but for FP1 the floor and new rear wing will only run on Lando’s car, while Oscar runs the existing package. This will allow us to get a really good comparison between them. If the data shows what we expect, we’ll then fit the full upgrade to both cars later in the weekend.

The rear wing is the priority, and we’ll want to confirm it has no unwanted behaviours. There’s always an element of risk when you’re pushing a rear wing hard, so that’s the item we’re most interested in verifying, as we’re pretty confident in the floor and brake ducts.

2. Navigating Zandvoort’s high-downforce nature and the variable weather conditions  

While Zandvoort is a high-downforce track, we’re not using the maximum downforce package that was introduced in Monaco. That rear wing is available this weekend, but we’d only go to maximum downforce if we were very sure the race was going to be wet, because it would make us very slow on the straight.

For the moment, it doesn’t look like it will be wet on Sunday, but the weather here on the North Sea coast is always changeable, and there is rain around. The bigger issue at the moment is the high winds. It isn’t a competitive disadvantage for us, but it’ll be incredibly problematic for everyone today, and it will make getting good data from practice quite tricky. Downforce is proportional to the wind speed over the car, squared. If you lose even 10km/h effective wind, that’s quite big, so having a 50km/h wind is massive – think of it as losing three or four years’ worth of development in a single corner!

The early forecast suggests Saturday is likely to be the wettest day, so hopefully today we’ll dodge the showers and learn what we need to learn about these new components. The potential for rain tomorrow will affect our thinking regarding tyre choices.

3. Deciding which tyres to use

We have Pirelli’s three hardest compounds this weekend, and coming to Zandvoort, our thinking is that all three are in play. The Soft has quite a benefit in grip on the first few laps, but the Hard will keep going with quite low degradation – if you can manage the temperatures.

The risk with the C1 Hard compound here is similar to the problem it can have in Barcelona: it slides around more than the other tyres, and that causes it to overheat. Preventing that is a real challenge for the drivers. Depending on what tyres you fit, it’ll be close between one and two stops.

The weather makes our choice of which tyres to take forward something of a moving target, and how we use the tyres will depend on how the forecast progresses through the day. It if looks highly likely Saturday will be wet, then there will be interest in saving more of the harder compounds for the race allocation, on the assumption Qualifying will take place on Wet or Intermediate tyres.

4. Overtaking is difficult, so Qualifying and strategy are key

On a dry weekend, this circuit has a pronounced Qualifying bias. Overtaking is difficult here. You can’t follow closely through Turn 13 (the penultimate corner). The banking makes Turn 14 flat-out – but even with that extending the effective length of the straight, it still isn’t a very long straight, and you need a much larger performance advantage to make a pass into Turn 1 than you do at other circuits – hence, starting position is vital. Thus, if Qualifying looks like it will be dry, there’s a desire to have the maximum number of Soft tyres available to get the most from it.

One other item that may impact strategy this weekend is the extension of the pit lane. Six garages have been added, which should make it easier to get in and out with a little more space between the pit boxes – but we also think it will increase the pit loss, which is something we’ll need to evaluate through practice. Because this is a 60km/h pit lane as opposed to the standard 80km/h, extending the length of the pit lane has a greater impact than it would elsewhere, potentially nudging things in the direction of one stop.

5. The other oddities of Circuit Zandvoort

One of the quirks of Zandvoort is the handedness of the circuit. Turns 1, 7, 8, 9, 13 and 14 are all long right-handers, which means wear on the front-left – the outside tyre – is very high. We’ll therefore be working with camber settings to protect that tyre as much as possible – while the drivers will be getting comfortable pushing much harder in the limited number of left-handers to even-out the wear.

It’s also not a particularly smooth circuit. Through Turns 5 to 7, it’s very bumpy, and the start-finish straight has some longitudinal ridges that run along it, making it important not to straddle those. There’s also the compression on the Turn 14 banking that squashes the car down lower than at an equivalent speed on the flat. It all has the potential to cause a little more skid wear than might be the case on a smooth circuit, so we’ll be looking at the underside of the cars very carefully between the runs today.

Finally, even if the weather doesn’t intervene, there’s potential for practice sessions here to be quite stop-start. We’re aware of Zandvoort being a track where cars can easily become beached in the gravel, and where Red Flags are not uncommon. We won’t change the plan for that – but equally, we won’t sit around in the garage, waiting for the perfect moment to go out. We’ll also have contingencies for what we do if there’s time lost for Red Flags to make sure we prioritise the most important learning.

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