Welcome to The Briefing, where we’ll be answering the key on-track questions ahead of the Monaco 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 Henry Fidler.

Monaco is one of the most unique races on the calendar. It’s short and extremely narrow, which presents numerous challenges for the wide, modern-day Formula 1 car. Flanked by barriers, mistakes are punished, and confidence can make a real difference, as drivers look to get as close to the walls as possible. Overtaking is also challenging, which increases the importance of Qualifying.

With Henry's help, we’ll explain how Monaco differs from other tracks on the calendar, what we do to prepare for this, and the ways we build driver confidence through practice.

Talk to us about the unique tyre rules in place this weekend. Presumably, this has been the subject of much discussion at the MTC?

There has been quite a bit of chat, yes! The starting point is that we are one step softer on tyres here than we were last year. We have the compounds that were on offer in Imola: C4, C5, C6.

The way the tyres behave on Sunday is very, very sensitive to how you drive. As we’ve seen previously in Monaco, if you drive a long way off the pace, you can make the tyres last a very long time. Last year, after the first-lap Red Flag, we completed nearly the full race distance on a C3 - George Russell did it with a C4.

The rules for this year have changed: we must use three different sets of tyres to enforce a two-stop strategy. Though, as usual, changing tyres during a Red Flag will still count as one of your ‘stops’. You do not have to use all three compounds, but can’t do the race on three sets of the same compound.

So, in that sense, it’s an additional tyre stop on top of what you would usually seek to do in Monaco. It introduces differences in the way you can approach the race. The normal approach everyone takes in Monaco is that track position is the most important thing. You just extend your first stint for as long as you can until you can stop without coming out behind a slow car. It doesn't necessarily work that way this year.

There’s lots of risk. Monaco is always a high-risk circuit for a Safety Car, and this may disincentivise you from going early. So, it’s a little bit more complicated than usual.

In the past, a Qualifying run has often included a warm-up lap before a push lap. Will that still be required with the C6?

We'll have to see. Quite possibly not. Last year, using the C5, there was a 50/50 split in Q3 between drivers doing a warm-up lap and those going for it on a first lap. It’s not strictly performance-based: there’s an element of wanting to be in sync with everyone else, doing fast laps when they’re doing fast laps. There’s a risk with doing a warm-up lap and then potentially encountering traffic on your fast lap. If you catch it at the wrong point, it can be detrimental.

Traditionally in Monaco, everyone goes into Qualifying with five sets of Soft tyres. Is that still going to be the case, or do these rules oblige you to do something different?

Quite possibly! A 5-1-1 [five Soft, one Medium, one Hard] tyre allocation gives you the best chance of getting through Qualifying well and starting with a good grid position – but these rules mean there’s more chance of a pushing race than it has been previously. It might make you want to bias towards the harder tyres, perhaps with 4-1-2.

That’s going to depend on how the Soft performs over an extended stint – which we don’t yet know, because it’s a C6. And then, what kind of shape is the race going to take? If we think the rules are going to create a race where everyone is pushing hard all the way, then possibly the C6 is not the right tyre for that sort of race, and you want to have either two Hard or two Medium tyres.

The C6 was quite a mysterious tyre last week when it made its race debut in Imola. Were the laps completed there useful, or have they raised more questions than answers?

Certainly at Imola, on Friday, it looked like the C6 was the fastest tyre at low fuel, and then it obviously became a lot trickier to get the lap time out of the tyre as we went to lower fuel, and the wind direction changed on Saturday. There’s also a question mark, based on what we saw in Qualifying, on whether the C6 is actually the outright fastest tyre in Qualifying.

If it isn’t, you have only a limited number of Medium compound tyres, so how would you build a run plan to make best use of those in Qualifying. It’s a complicated question.

Is this a question left to the strategists during practice, with race engineering, Lando, and Oscar concentrating on setup, or is everyone involved?

Things like figuring out a Qualifying run plan is very much a collaborative exercise between race engineer and strategy. Strategy will have a view on which tyre is quicker in pure performance terms, while race engineering will be looking at how easy it is to deliver that lap, and how robust we are at putting that fast lap together. The eventual plan is probably driven as much by the driver as anyone else.

Of course, the main focus on Friday for race engineering will, as usual, be to get the cars setup in the right place and – standard for Monaco – to give the drivers as many laps as we possibly can so that they are as well dialled-in for Qualifying as they can be. Building confidence is vital this weekend: the drivers will get closer and closer to the walls with successive laps, picking up the pace as they do.

The demands of Monaco are unique: has the car much changed from previous races?

Lando signed off our Monaco-spec high downforce rear wing with a lap in FP3 last weekend, so that will be on the car here. We also have changes to the front suspension with a different steering arm to allow the cars to get around Loews Hairpin. It’s something we do every year: it gives the car more steering angle from lock to lock, to get around that corner. It’s a shorter steering arm, so you get a bit more travel.

We will hit the end-stops of the steering rack in the hairpin, so the driver gets to the maximum they can. Loews is the only corner on the calendar that needs this. The second-tightest corner of the year is Turn 1 in Bahrain, which is fine with the standard setup. Loews is unique: by far the tightest and slowest corner of the year. It’s the only first-gear corner too.

Races in Monaco always see trains of cars forming. Do you need to take that into account when setting up a cooling package?

It can make the afternoon difficult for the brakes. Not because there is heavy braking but because you don’t go fast enough to get a huge amount of cooling and there’s a constant sequence of braking events without any let up, and that can be problematic in traffic. It’s something that will be looked at during practice.

This generation of car works best when it’s very stiff, and very low – but there’s a few kerbs the cars hit hard. How do you set up for those?

The Nouvelle Chicane is probably the heaviest kerbing event, then the second part of the Swimming Pool, though T16, you are all over the apex kerb. There’s also a lot of warp in the track at Mirabeau: the track drops away a lot on the inside, and the drivers try to hook into the gutter. In order to keep the front-right tyre on the ground there, you have to run the car quite soft.

Certainly, we run low stiffnesses to deal with those chicanes, because the penalty for having to drive around the chicane is too high, or if you misjudge the entry slightly and end up on the kerb without having the car setup for it, it could be very penalising – particularly in T16 where, if you get spat-off the kerb, you’re straight into the wall at the exit.

Do you start the weekend with a very compliant car and gradually make it a little stiffer as you go through practice and the drivers’ confidence levels rise?

It's an interesting question. From a driver-confidence point of view, which is what Monaco is all about, potentially starting on the softer side is the right thing to do. And then you make the car stiffer incrementally. The risk is that you never get to the limit of how far you can go with the stiffness.

The other element of this is that half the track, from T12 around to T3, has been resurfaced, and we’ll have to find out how the most prominent bumps have been treated. If those have been smoothed out a bit, then potentially it allows you to run the car a little bit stiffer. One of many things we need to discover today.

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