Welcome to The Briefing, where we’ll be answering the key on-track questions ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix.

Each week, powered by Google Cloud, we’ll be speaking to one of our trackside experts to walk you through the biggest talking points and provide you with a simplified guide of what you’ll need to know to jump straight into the action. This week, we spoke to Will Joseph.

The Red Bull Ring is a unique circuit. Nestled in the Austrian Alps, it combines elevation changes and unpredictable weather with a circuit of two halves. In the first half of the lap, power and low drag are important, while high downforce is crucial in the second half.

We’re also set for a return to the traditional Grand Prix weekend format here, after several years of Sprints in Austria, while Formula 2 Championship leader Alex Dunne will replace Lando in the MCL39 in FP1, as part of the Sporting Regulation requirement to field a rookie driver in at least four FP1 sessions a season.

In this weekend’s edition of the briefing, with the help of Will, we’ll explain all of the above and look into how that will affect us.

Speaking ahead of the weekend, Alex Dunne is set to replace Lando in FP1. Why was the Red Bull Ring chosen for one of these sessions?

Each driver has to give up two sessions this year, and we’ve tried to pick races that penalise us a little less. This is a track where Lando’s generally quite comfortable, but also there’s a programme of work this morning that we want to do that doesn’t really require one of the race drivers. Alex gets to make a valuable contribution to the team and gain good experience, but Lando doesn’t lose valuable preparation.

You’re taking a back seat for the session. How will you spend this time?

Adrian Goodwin will be Alex’s race engineer for FP1. Adrian was the Race Engineer when Alex did his TPC test in the MCL38 at the Circuit of the Americas, so there’s good continuity there. It’s valuable experience for Adrian as well as Alex, should he ever need to step in for me or Tom.

It is quite a novel experience for me. I’ll be here to support Adrian, but part of me is also very interested in listening to the other side of the garage and seeing how they operate. It’s a rare opportunity to do that in a live environment, and I’ll be learning as much as possible.

Does having less practice in previous years impact what you’ll do today?

I think the interesting thing is, because the last three have been Sprints, you could say that we've never had the opportunity to dial-in the car. The approach has been to bring a robust car, make a few small tweaks in the single practice session and go. We might find that this weekend, with three sessions, we get to really dial it in.

Is there any longer-term experimentation planned?

Yes. There’s a fairly extensive aerodynamic programme for Alex, and there’s even work being done on Oscar’s car, so FP1 will be busy. Alex will be running with the front wheel rake fitted – which is the big grid that sits behind both front wheels – and in the background some of those tests will go on through FP2 as well.

Is this a test of new components or more learning about the existing car?

Little bit of both. We’re continuing to evaluate the new front wing that was tested in Canada. There are also some new front suspension components fitted this weekend that we need to confirm are delivering as expected. Separately, we will also be comparing across the cars the original and new medium downforce rear wings that ran in Montreal. So, it’ll be a busy day, and we’ll have lots of decisions to make on Friday night.

The lap here feels like it’s split into two halves. How do you cope with the different demands and how big a factor is track warp this weekend?

Particularly at Turn 3, the warp between the entry, mid-corner, and exit is something we really suffer with. It can be tricky. Some of the drivers will use the apex kerb, some will stay off it to avoid the extra bumps and potential ride issues. It’s part of a set of trades we have to make: for the first half of the lap, you want lower roll-stiffness, and for the second higher-roll stiffness. There’s always this balance to find.

This is a very rapid lap – from a race engineering point of view, is it a help or hindrance that the cars are coming around every 65 seconds?

From a learning perspective, you get more laps, so you get more practice. On the other hand, everything is happening very quickly and the difficulty comes from the speed at which you have to make decisions. So, it has its pros and cons. It’s the opposite problem at somewhere like Spa, where, if you get it wrong, you have a long way to go around before you can correct it.

Finally, the C6 tyre has posed a lot of questions in recent weeks. Is it a comparatively simpler weekend in Austria to have C3, C4, C5?

The C6 certainly makes the weekends a little tougher. With the fixed allocation, you have the tricky question of having to decide whether to run through Qualifying, keeping the C6 fitted to gain the benefit of continuity, or switch to the C5, which might offer more performance in certain conditions. We’ve reviewed the C6 across the three weekends it’s been used, and that’s given us useful information for the future races where it might be used – but yes, this weekend, having the C5 as the Soft tyre does make all of it more straightforward.

The interesting thing about tyres this weekend is that, in recent years, because this has been a Sprint event, you go into the race with different tyres than would be the case at a standard weekend. The tyres seem a little more robust this year, but there’s still a question mark over whether you would like to keep two sets of Mediums or two Hard tyres, which is another thing to find out today.

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