Welcome to The Briefing, where we’ll be answering the key on-track questions ahead of the Qatar 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, ahead of FP1, we spoke to Andrew Jarvis.

There’s a strategic anomaly at play in this week’s Qatar Grand Prix. For the first time here since 2023, teams have been imposed with a pre-defined limit on tyre usage, impacting how many pit stops we’ll be required to make during the Grand Prix. Gravel strips have also been installed around the circuit to address track limit concerns, while there are some question marks regarding wind direction, which teams will be looking into.

With the help of Andrew, we’ll explain what this means for the team and how they were planning to tackle these questions ahead of Sprint Qualifying in the weekend’s only Practice session.

We have some interesting local rules for tyre use this weekend. Can you walk us through what that means for the team?

The tyre allocation is the same as last year, with Pirelli’s three hardest compounds on offer, but for 2025, we have a limit of 25 laps on each set of tyres. This measure has been introduced because we saw a couple of tyre failures last year, for Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz, and post-event inspections of the tyres suggested we weren’t very far off either.

This is a track where you need a significant tyre delta to overtake. With everyone compelled to do shorter stints, that’s going to be more difficult to come by - so you really need to qualify in front. We’ll want to use our limited time to figure out the best approaches to the Qualifying sessions: what sort of out-lap we need, whether a single cool-down lap is sufficient, or if we’ll need to do a double-cool and so on.

That said, it’s not necessarily a case of setting the car up purely for Qualifying performance - there are still race-ability aspects to consider, and it’s a long way from the start line down to Turn 1, so the rear wing choice isn’t set in stone.

There’s a choice between our high-downforce rear wing and a medium-downforce rear wing, and decisions to make around pairing them with a choice of beam wings. Obviously, we only have one Practice session this weekend, so we may use it for tests across the two cars.

Finally, Lusail is a difficult circuit physically for the drivers, probably the hardest of the year because the grip is very high and the G-forces through the fast corners – especially Turns 12-14 – put a lot of strain on the neck. The drivers train specifically for it, because it’s so physically demanding. ’23 was very difficult, but this year, like last year, temperatures are lower, which reduces the physical workload – but guaranteeing a two-stop race with these rules means they can push hard for the whole race, which raises the physical workload.

There has been some work done around the track since last year. Is this something to explore?

We saw high track evolution here in 2023 after the track was resurfaced, and quite a bit last year, but we think by now it should be in pretty good condition. What’s new is that more gravel strips have been added at the exit of Turn 6, the exit of Turn 10, earlier in Turn 14 and at the exit of Turn 16. Effectively, it means Turn 7 is the only corner that doesn’t have gravel at the exit.

The work has been done to deal with the issue of track limits. Gravel isn’t great for the floor of the car, so there’s a reliability concern for everyone, and certainly part-attrition has been high here in the past.

In the past, the wind direction has been a factor here. How does it get into your thinking?

It's a very flat circuit, so it's very open to kind of wind direction changes. It tends to be stronger in the afternoon sessions, dying down for the evening. At the moment, it looks like we’ll have a headwind into Turn 1 all the way through the weekend, so it’s less of an issue as you can set your car up for that. If it’s strong and the direction is changeable, it impacts everything, and becomes a big factor in how the driver has to approach the lap. It also blows sand and grit across the track, which means it resets between the sessions.

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