Welcome to The Briefing, where you can get a jumpstart on the Monaco Grand Prix with our guide to the key topics.

Every race weekend, we’ll speak to one of our engineers to discuss the key talking points ahead of the upcoming Grand Prix, and simplify them so that you can dive straight into the action with a better idea of what to expect, and what you should be looking out for.  

This week, powered by Google Cloud, we spoke to Jose Manuel López. Jose explains why we’ll be working in reverse order on our testing programme, how we plan to build up our confidence and add performance across the practice sessions, and why the weather forecast could impact this weekend’s action.  

Here’s what you need to know…

1. Working backwards from the race  

The practice plan for Monaco… well, it’s the normal practice plan for Monaco! We tend to think about the weekend in reverse order, working backwards from the race. The race, it’s a one-stop, anything else is too slow, both in a deterministic way and also because track position is king, as you can defend fairly easily.

Therefore, what matters is qualifying well, which makes Saturday the most important part of the weekend. The primary goal of practice is to ensure we can extract the maximum from the package of car and driver, to maximise our qualifying potential.

2. Building up confidence through Free Practice

For the latter, we need to instil the drivers with good confidence, which will allow them to get closer and closer to the walls as the weekend progresses. To do that, we need to ensure we have maximum time on track and minimum time in the garage. Every extra lap we can do in Free Practice will be important. 

We need to be on the limit in Monaco but the problem is that this circuit isn’t forgiving. A small mistake and you’re in the wall and lose the rest of the session. This isn’t a risk the team wants to run, and so it’s a place to build-up pace across practice, rather than starting FP1 with an optimised set-up.

3. Adding performance gradually

With this generation of cars, we try to exploit the ground effect as much as possible. This means we normally run the cars reasonably stiff and low. In Monaco, that’s no different, but it challenges the drivers even more, with the risk of hitting the crowns of the road, which is significant in Monaco, particularly at Turn 1 and all the way up the hill to Turn 3. So, that’s something to experiment with.

And so, you start with the set-up on the conservative side – on the safe side – and then as you build-up data, you start to push those parameters towards the direction you think is quicker, and you do this together with the driver. It isn’t only an engineering decision, it’s a conversation. It’s very normal to start a little higher, a little softer, and add performance, getting lower and stiffer, gradually.

There are limiting factors. Track warp is a factor we’ll consider more here than elsewhere. Monaco has so much warp – the most of the year by a big margin – which strongly suggests the fastest car isn’t the stiffest car in terms of roll stiffnesses. You need some compliance to make sure the tyres stay on the track. If it’s a little bit too stiff, you’re going to get a lot of three-wheeling. There’s always some three-wheeling in Monaco regardless, but you need to minimise it.

4. We will be testing out Monaco-specific rear wings

In terms of downforce, we’ll be using new rear wings in Monaco. One version we signed off in Imola, running it at the start of FP3 on Oscar’s car, to make sure it was behaving as expected.

There will be a little bit of aero work in FP1 to ensure those are working as expected – not with rakes or anything bulky and time-consuming like that, just flo-vis and some CSLs [Constant Speed Limit] on the full-throttle sections of track.

5. Tyre investigations

In terms of tyre investigations, we will want to look at which combination of one-stop race is likely to work best – but primarily we’re interested in Qualifying performance. The tyre warm-up here is usually tricky for the front, while the rears are ready immediately. That means sometimes the second lap can be better, despite a little less overall grip.

If you’ve watched Monaco Qualifying in the past, you’ll know that, potentially, there are multiple laps on each tyre set to extract the most from Qualifying. There’s lots of ways of doing a Qualifying lap in Monaco, and we’ll be considering all of the options across practice: first lap, warm-up lap, classic push-cool-push, double cool.

6. The weather will have a role to play in our plans

Finally, we’re having this discussion with the sun shining. The forecast suggests that may not last through Free Practice. If we have rain, and if we think it’s likely there will be more rain during Qualifying, then there’s a lot of value in getting some wet weather running to understand how the car behaves, and how it responds to various set-up parameters. It’s not a circuit where the weather forecast will have us thinking about downforce settings – because we’ve already got maximum downforce on the car – but for everything else, we’d like some more data.

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