Welcome to The Briefing, where we’ll be answering the key on-track questions ahead of the Spanish 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 Cédric Michel-Grosjean.

Having tested at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya numerous times over the years, it’s a track the team know well, but that doesn’t mean it will be a quiet weekend. Characteristically, Barcelona and Monaco couldn’t be much more different, meaning that the team will have their work cut out to turn the car setup around in time.

They’ll also want to experiment with several items on the car, given the track’s usefulness in this regard. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya is a great all-round test of a Formula 1 car, featuring a diverse range of challenges, including elevation changes and high- and low-speed corners.

With the help of Cédric, we’ll explain what this means for Lando and Oscar, as well as what we’ll be testing and how we’ll tune our setup for Spain.

It’s been five days since we were in Monaco, and there couldn’t be a bigger difference between two F1 circuits. What factors are on your mind this weekend?

Compared to Monaco – but also to Imola – it’s a lot less bumpy at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, which will be nice! It means we’ll mainly be limited by porpoising through the high-speed and very high-speed corners.

It’s interesting because there’s a shift between Qualifying and the race, with those corners – T3, T9, T13, T14 – that are power-limited in Qualifying becoming grip-limited on Sunday [with a heavier car]. That moves the optimal ride height, especially at the rear of the car, and can make porpoising worse, so it’s something we have to dial out across practice, finding the best compromise.

Barcelona tends to be F1’s datum track for testing. Will there be a lot of experimentation today?

Plenty to do today. There’s a new technical directive this weekend which requires us to run stainless steel skids on at least one car in both practice sessions. Last year in China, and this year in Japan, the sparks coming off the titanium skids were causing grass fires. To combat this, we’re changing to stainless-steel skids.

The new materials are being tested here, and we’ll do a cross-car compare today, with Oscar running the steel skids and Lando staying with the titanium. It’s a big test item, not something we’ve run before. 

Before the race introduction, we need to understand the impact on wear-rate, the harshness of bottoming, and so on, so lots to learn and mileage to accumulate.

For the previous generation of cars, Barcelona would require the same maximum downforce aero package as Monaco – but for these ground-effect cars, it’s not so extreme. Will the package be different this weekend?

Yes. For the first seven races we’ve been choosing between a medium downforce and a medium-low downforce rear wing. We introduced a maximum downforce rear wing in Monaco last weekend, and have a new high downforce rear wing for this race.

We think high downforce will be optimum for this track, but we will split the cars in FP1 to be sure, with Lando using the medium downforce version that ran in Imola, and Oscar on the new high downforce option. We’ll analyse the data after FP1 and make a decision on which way to go for the rest of the weekend. We’re also going to test different levels of front brake cooling.

The 2025 technical regs also bring in a more stringent front wing vertical deflection test this weekend. What will that do to how the car handles?

We signed off the new front wing during practice in Imola. It only ran on Lando’s car there, but both drivers have been trying it out in the simulator. It will make the cars a bit more pointy on initial turn-in.

Barcelona has a reputation for being tough on tyres – but for the last few years, the Hard tyre hasn’t been particular popular here. Is that likely to be the case again, now that Pirelli have tweaked the compounds?

Hard to know. The compounds should be spaced a bit better throughout the range this year. There used to be a large gap between the C1 and C2, and it should be a bit smaller now. We didn’t run the C1 Hard tyre in the race in Bahrain, but we did in Japan, where it seemed to be quite good. That gives us a little more confidence in its performance.

Obviously, Suzuka has a different layout and different temperatures. We may see the same situation as last year, where the Hard tyre was just sliding, didn’t bite well, and suffered for it. The track isn’t quite as extreme as Bahrain, but it is on the high end of the roughness scale. This weekend is quite a lot warmer than last year. We’ll know a lot more after today’s running.

We do know that thermal degradation will be very high, with new tyres being very quick and falling off rapidly, with the best laps coming at the start of a stint, if not on the first lap out of the pits. Overtaking is tough here – but if you can extend a stint and create a tyre delta, it’s a lot easier to get through cars.

What does that mean for Qualifying?

This is a circuit where it’s almost always a first-lap tyre. Running a used set, or doing push-cool-push, tends to be a lot slower.

Using the old layout, with the chicane at the end of the lap, drivers had to back off a bit in the first sector and save some tyre life for the last sector. Is that still the case running without the chicane?

It could be a bit painful at times with the chicane. Without it, I would say the drivers have to be mindful of their tyre budget but there isn’t anything specific they should or must do. Like any Qualifying lap, the drivers want to avoid big slides on exits when they are grip limited and coming on power.

This circuit has a high number of those combined exits, and the drivers spend a long time in that phase, and have to be careful. The fast corners of T3 and T9 are easy-flat in Qualifying, so it’s not a case of being on the limit of grip, but they should take care. Something else to understand today.

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