Welcome to The Briefing, where you can get a jumpstart on the Saudi Arabian 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 Jose Manuel López, where he explained the impact of driver confidence and finding the limits around Saudi Arabia, the importance of understanding our tyres and delved into the competitiveness of a fast field in the early stages of the season.

1. Driver confidence is vital at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit

On this kind of circuit, having a predictable car, and the driver confidence it delivers, are the main players in practice, as the drivers get closer and closer to the walls as their confidence increases. That’s a key factor to extracting most from the car and the track. So, like other street circuits, having plenty of time on track is fundamental. There’s a steep learning curve, more than on a traditional circuit.

The Jeddah Corniche Circuit is a continuous combination of corners, with very little time where the steering wheel is straight. Much of it is power-limited, and to the spectators, it might not look like a corner, but the driver will still be feeling the G-forces. It makes it quite a tiring circuit but also a challenging one for working the wheel, using the switches, communicating on the radio – so the practice laps are useful in getting comfortable with that as well.

There’s also a significant disparity between the car in race trim and the car in qualifying trim. Some of the corners that are power-limited on a qualifying lap become grip-limited with a full load of fuel in the car. It’s important for the drivers to become comfortable with that.

2. FP2 will be the key practice session

FP1 and FP3 are earlier in the day, before the track temperatures drop for FP2, Qualifying and the race, which makes FP2 the critical session. When the track temperatures drop 10-15°C, it might be a car balance that had a little bit of oversteer earlier in the day starts behaving well in the cooler evening temperatures. The engineers at the track have to always be thinking ahead.

Not much has changed in our run plans from last year to this. The high-level priorities are still to understand the tyres, understanding the aerodynamics.

The aero-scans are pointing to a lower drag version of the rear wing than that which we used last weekend because Saudi is more about efficiency and top speeds than Bahrain.

3. There are question marks around the tyres

The tyres in Jeddah will work very differently to how they worked in Bahrain, and we have a lot of learning to do. We haven’t run the C4 at all this year. It’s the same tyre as last year, so it isn’t a complete unknown, but we haven’t used it yet on the MCL38. We think it’s the best tyre for Qualifying but last year it suffered a lot of graining in Jeddah, which means it’s perhaps not the preferred tyre for the race.

This could change, according to how much grip you have. The circuit is the same and the tyre is the same – but our car is quite different to this time last year. We improved a lot across the season and took another step over the winter, so we can’t rely on last year’s data. It will be interesting to see how the tyre behaves now we have a car that’s a bit more competitive.

It isn’t just a question of understanding it at high fuel. Qualifying is very interesting in Jeddah, because there are many approaches. Is it a first-lap tyre, or does it need a preparation lap? Do we need to do fast-slow-fast, and it’s the second timed lap that’s actually the fastest? Will this change across the sessions as the track grips-up?

We saw many different approaches last year, and it’s something we really need to understand well. It’s very important that the drivers, tyre group, and race engineering work together to understand exactly the best way to extract the performance from the tyre. It’s a big thing we will have to get right, because Qualifying is slightly more important in Jeddah than it was in Bahrain.

4. There isn’t much to separate most of the field

In this generation of cars, overtaking is a little easier, and we have more of a race bias everywhere – but as we saw even in Bahrain, starting position had a huge impact on the outcome of the race. In such a tight field, the pace delta is very small, so whoever starts ahead has more options and opportunities. We’ve really got maximise our learning today.

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