The Briefing: 2026 Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix – powered by Google Cloud

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

Each week, powered by Google Cloud, one of our trackside experts will join us to explain all of the weekend’s biggest talking points. This week, ahead of FP1, we spoke with Senior Racing Director Randy Singh.

After back-to-back Sprint weekends and the Monaco Grand Prix, this weekend’s return to the more traditional Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya - and three Free Practice sessions - makes this a key round for testing. We’ll be carrying out a range of experiments across the car while continuing to build our understanding of the upgrades introduced in Miami and Canada.

This weekend will also see F1 Reserve Driver Leonardo Fornaroli make his first appearance in a Formula 1 session. The Italian will take part in Free Practice 1 in place of Lando, completing one of the four rookie FP1 sessions mandated by the Formula 1 regulations.

With the help of Randy, we’ll walk you through our plans for Practice, explain what to expect from the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, and look at what’s in store for Leo during his FP1 outing.

Leo is in the car for FP1, executing one of our four mandated rookie sessions. Why have we decided to do one of these at this track?

The requirement is that each race driver must give up two sessions over the year. One of the first things we do when deciding which circuits to target, is ask the race drivers which circuits they’d like to do. Then we consider the complexities of the different tracks. This year, in particular, with the demands of the power units, some are easier, some are harder.

Beyond this, we also consider which circuits Leo knows well, and where he would have the best shot of helping the team and putting in a strong performance for the benefit of his own development.

Barcelona was one of the circuits where Lando was prepared to miss FP1, and so Leo will make his debut. It’s a chance for him to drive the current F1 car for the first time. He’s done plenty of MCL60 laps in TPC (Testing of Previous Cars), including one here in Barcelona, and of course, he’s done this track on the simulator. We can involve him heavily in our testing plan today, he’ll run with rakes fitted to his car, and the learning that he’ll do is learning for the team, and also for Lando and his engineers, such that when Lando jumps in for FP2, he can get straight on with it.

This is our first chance since March to have a full practice programme on a ‘normal’ circuit. Is there anything new on the car this weekend, and what does the practice programme look like?

It’s a pretty standard run plan this weekend. We’re not introducing anything totally new, but we will be doing experiments on a variety of parts – front and rear wings, for example – that we’ve introduced in the last few races as we continue to understand more about them. We’ll continue making small iterations and develop our learning.

Barcelona traditionally has been one of the most demanding circuits for tyres – but this year we’ve gone a step softer in the allocation. What do you need to learn in practice?

As you say, the tyres are a step softer this year. It doesn’t necessarily change the race, because last year the Soft [C3] and Medium [C2] compounds were the preferred race tyres, and those become Medium and Hard this year. Removing last year’s Hard [C1] doesn’t have much of a downside because it wasn’t really the best race tyre.

The priority today will be assessing this year’s Soft [C4] compound. We need to learn where it sits compared to the Medium and Hard, and work out what our tyre allocation should be going forward. Of course, we need to learn about the new Soft compound for Qualifying, but if it performs very well, you might see a three-stop race come into play. This seems very unlikely – but we’ll have to find out.

How is this year’s race going to be different to the sort of Grand Prix we’ve seen in Barcelona in recent years?

It’s going to be hot and dry this weekend, so controlling the temperatures of the rear tyres is going to be a big issue for everyone. It’s also a track where there are genuine risks with track limits, so the drivers will need to give that their full attention too.

As for the race, often we get a good read on Barcelona from racing in Bahrain, which we haven’t done this year – but they’re not necessarily the same sort of race. While the tyres here tend to suffer the same sort of degradation as they do at Sakhir, the thing to bear in mind is that Barcelona, in recent years, has seen relatively easy overtaking, which is also like Bahrain.

What we don’t know this year – one of the biggest unknowns actually – is whether overtaking will become harder, because of the difficulty we’re expecting with energy harvesting. Potentially, that would take us back to how Barcelona was five or six years ago, when the weekend was a little more qualifying-biased, because overtaking was difficult. Which sort of race we’re looking at is definitely something we’ll be assessing today.