Welcome to The Briefing, where we’ll be answering the key on-track questions ahead of the Canadian 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 Tom Stallard.

The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is among the circuits that demands the most from a car, requiring speed and durability due to its combination of long straights and heavy braking zones. Early in the season, this can, and has, caught teams out in the past. Part of Tom and the team’s job this weekend will be to ensure that doesn’t happen to us.

They will also be looking to answer some questions around our tyre choices for the weekend, and will be exploring what impact 2023’s resurfacing has had in dry running, after a primarily wet weekend last year. With the help of Tom, we’ll explain all of the above and more.

We have the C6 back in the allocation this weekend. What does that mean around the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve?

After a weekend on the hardest tyres in Barcelona, we’re back onto Pirelli’s softest compounds in Canada – and the tricky thing for us is that, so far, the C6 compound has not been clearly quicker than the C5, either in Imola or even in Monaco. Potentially, the peak of the C6 is a little bit quicker, but delivering the laps on it, so far, has been more difficult. This is something to investigate today.

The dilemma here is that we have lots of C6s and not very many C4s and C5s. Do we want to save C5s, or stay consistent with the C6, and not change things around too much? Choices for the race are reasonably straightforward, but this is an issue for Qualifying. The decisions teams take will impact the sort of practice programme they do.

The track was resurfaced after the 2023 race, and 2024 was a wet weekend. Does the team know enough about the surface or is there still work to do?

As far as we know, the 2023 race is still a reasonable reference. The resurfaced track is likely to have more graining, but equally, the 2025 tyres are more resistant to graining, so 2023 is a good place to start. Last year, we discovered that the resurfacing hadn’t made the track smooth. It’s still pretty bumpy – but it isn’t more bumpy, which has been the case at a few resurfaced circuits.

Montreal has no high-speed, not many low-speed, and lots of medium-speed chicanes. How do you setup the car for this?

These cars are rewarded by running stiff, much more so than in other eras, and so there’s less kerb-riding in Montreal now than there has been in some eras – but still more than we would see for much of the year.

Turns 2 and 10 are low-speed corners, Turn 5 would be high-speed, but it’s taken flat, even with race fuel – unless you’re trying to save the tyre – so doesn’t really count – which leaves you with a lot of medium-speed. We’re heavily incentivised to make the car very stiff and difficult in high speed in order to maximise low-speed grip. We’ll build in quite high heave stiffness, but drop the roll stiffness to be able to use the kerbs where we need to. That’s the broad set-up direction for Canada.

Do you start the weekend with a car approximating a race setup, or do you gradually stiffen up the car through the practice sessions?

It might be a tiny bit more compliant at the start, and we may do some experiments to investigate how stiff we can make it – but realistically, the car for FP1 won’t be a million miles away from the intended race car. If we faced a situation of being torn between two setup options, not knowing which was best, in that situation we’d probably choose to start with the softer one. That might also depend on what the weather is doing.

Where does this track fit on the downforce scale?

The downforce level for Montreal is similar to Imola, so we’ll be running with the same medium downforce rear wing we had for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix and used for most of the weekend in Barcelona. It won’t be quite the same setup as either of those circuits: we also have quite a lot of range in our options for a beam wing, and we’ll be investigating what works best around this track.

Until recently, Montreal and Barcelona would have required a very different aerodynamic setup. What’s changed to bring them closer together?

Barcelona has changed while Montreal has stayed the same. These cars have very high performance, and it means that the fast corners in Spain – T3, T9, T13, T14 – are flat out so, effectively, the track has fewer corners and that moves the downforce level quite a bit. In contrast, the only high-speed corner in Montreal is T5, and that’s always been flat.

Are there any tests planned for today?

Yes. We have a new front wing and a new rear wing here as test parts. We’ll be evaluating them in FP1, but they aren’t intended as race parts. For the front wing, we’ll have one car test it with a rake fitted, and then the other do a performance test.

Canada is famously tough on brakes. Why is that the case – and is it an absolute problem, or an issue only if you’re too greedy with cooling?

Canada traditionally has been one of the circuits with the highest brake energy. It’s a different challenge to circuits like, for instance, Monaco. That race can be difficult for the brakes, but the issue there is, in traffic, getting enough air for cooling, rather than the absolute amount of energy going into the brakes.

The demands here are not so different to places like Austria, Monza, maybe Vegas but this is traditionally the circuit with high brake energy that we go to first – and I think in the past it has perhaps caught out teams who’ve not developed parts capable of dealing with that, and so sometimes you’ll see a team with a solution that works well in Monaco but not necessarily so well in Canada.

Obviously, the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is aerodynamically much more sensitive than Monaco, so in Monaco you’re more comfortable running a big scoop to get air in – whereas in Canada that extra cooling is costing you some performance. So, it’s a circuit where teams have got that compromise wrong in the past.

It isn’t just a question of temperatures though. Torques are much higher here, so the wear is also high. Even if you’ve got the temperatures under control, you can get caught out on brake wear. Again, the contrast is that, in Monaco, you don’t have high brake torques. You can lose brake performance in Monaco because the callipers get so hot they’re essentially melting, whereas in Canada, the end-of-straight speeds are high and the stops are long, so the brakes have to take extremely high start-stop torques.

The braking events also come in swift succession, so you can have problems with fading and things like that. It’s just a shift in the challenges compared to the most recent circuits we’ve been to. It’s something we have to get absolutely right today – preferably immediately. There is a lot of time available in the braking phase, so if the drivers have good confidence in the brakes, that’s worth quite a lot.

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