Welcome to The Briefing, where you can get a jumpstart on the Las Vegas 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, Andrew Jarvis joined us, and despite development of the 2024 car having slowed down, there's a lot for him to go through. Last year’s Las Vegas Grand Prix presented several unique challenges, which we’ll need to answer again this year. Andrew will explain what’s unusual about the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and what we’ll be prioritising in Free Practice, walking us through the team’s decision-making process for the many setup questions they’re needing to answer.

Here’s what we’ll be working on and what you need to know…

1. 2024 development might be winding down, but there’s still plenty to test

At this point in the season, with development of this car winding down, and attention turning to 2025, we don’t have a huge amount of test items in the programme. We do, however, have unusual environmental conditions, which present an opportunity to do some tests that wouldn’t be suitable elsewhere.

2. The colder temperatures will make strategy interesting

Aside from that, the main focus of what we’ll do is race prep. Specifically, this evening, that means learning how the tyres behave and which tyre allocation we want to take into the race. Being a street circuit, this track starts in a really poor condition, and has high evolution across the weekend. The grip is low and the surface – bumps notwithstanding – is very smooth. The cold ambient conditions put the tyres into a really weird working range. It’s very different to everywhere else – the closest we get to these conditions elsewhere is if we’re doing winter testing in Europe.

The deterministic strategy is a one-stop, probably Medium>Hard, but Soft>Hard isn’t too far away. It depends on how the Soft tyre behaves because it might be a really bad race tyre, if we see a lot of cold-graining like we did last year.

With cold graining, the grip-loss mechanism is the same as for normal graining, in that the surface rubber is ripping, balling up, and coming away. It produces the same lap-time loss as normal graining, but it can lead to greater tyre wear. As this is most likely to impact the Soft tyre, it makes it less suitable for the race.

According to the models, we should see a relatively easy one-stop – but we expect there could be quite a few incidents, so teams often keep an insurance set of extra tyres in their allocation in case of a Safety Car or a Red Flag. The question becomes: if we want that insurance set, do we want an extra set of Mediums or an extra set of Hards? Figuring that out is a job for FP1. We have a direction in which we’re leaning – but we’ll need to run on the track, before knowing for certain – both in terms of our own performance and seeing how other teams are faring. It’s a big focus for practice.

3. There are a lot of setup questions to answer

The other issue here is that we have long straights, and low downforce, so we must decide what the correct rear wing to use is. We’ve got two options here: a low and an ultra-low downforce version. We have a slight preference for one over the other, but they’re really close and it’s quite likely we’ll take a look at both.

It isn’t something we can judge with any degree of certainty before running. It will depend on the state of the track. Obviously, last year was our first visit, and it will have developed since then. Most of it – but not all – is open to traffic so understanding how it has evolved will have an impact on downforce choice. It’s also a few degrees colder than last year, which will also have an impact.

Then there is the potential for new – or bigger – bumps. Being a street circuit, there’s no opportunity to do scans or study running from other series, so it’s a case of learning on track and adapting on the fly. The bumps around T10-T11 from last year may be the limiting factor. Understanding how they've changed is going to be critical, particularly to maximise ride heights and getting the car as low as possible.

There are a couple of higher-speed grip-limited corners, but for the most part, this circuit has uniform 100km/h corners, most of which are lefts, only T5 and T8 go right. So, the operating regime of the car is quite specific to that cornering speed, and we have to optimise around it. We will want a compliant car in roll, to offer low-speed grip while running across kerbs. And, we’ll want a stiff car in heave, to manage ride-heights and improve braking performance. It’s a different sort of setup from what we would see at most circuits.

4. Qualifying won’t be simple  

Qualifying will be tricky, and we want to learn about one-lap pace. Last year, in FP1, we saw graining on the out lap, but as the grip level came up, the Soft tyre improved, and by Qualifying, we could do two, maybe three timed laps before it was really having an impact. Colder temperatures may make it a little worse but we expect to see similar conditions again.

The difficulty that presents for Qualifying – and what we’d like to learn about in practice if conditions allow – is that we have to get the tyres up to temperature in Qualifying, but do so without introducing graining. If the graining is less severe, then we may see the types of run plan usually associated with an Intermediate tyre in light rain – doing multiple laps and improving as the tyre gets warmer.

5. Driver confidence will be critical

Being a street circuit, we’d like to give the drivers as many laps as possible to get used to the track. There’s only so much you can do with setup, and a lot of the performance differentiator is having a driver that’s comfortable and confident. More laps will let them figure out the specifics of the track.

On this circuit, straight-line braking is very important. There are three heavy braking zones and one medium braking zone, and understanding those is critical. Turn 6, for example, is very difficult because it’s a blind corner. The drivers can’t spot their braking point by looking at the apex, they have to pick it up by looking at a brake board or an advertising hoarding. Things like that take a while to get comfortable with.

Obviously, there are barriers as well, so progressively moving closer and closer to those and maximising track width is a difficult thing to do, so doing as many laps as possible is useful. Potentially, if the track is in poor condition and the tyres are struggling in FP1, we might lose a few laps – but for the rest of the weekend, we’d expect to have a normal run plan similar to what we would see at other long-lap circuits like Spa or Baku.

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