Welcome to The Briefing, where we’ll be answering the key on-track questions ahead of the Chinese 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, Oscar’s Performance Engineer.

Setup at the Shanghai International Circuit is not too dissimilar to where the cars raced last weekend in Albert Park – but the test in China is very different, with the added complications and opportunities of the Sprint weekend format. We’ll be discussing what challenges this pose, as well as explaining why downforce is importance despite the circuit’s two long straights and looking into the impact of the Shanghai International Circuit recently re-laid tarmac.  

We’ve arrived at the Shanghai International Circuit to see a re-laid surface – what impact is this likely to have on the race weekend?

We’d expect to have a very similar car to the one prepared last week for a wet race in Albert Park – but we have to keep an open mind because the track resurfacing brings some uncertainty with it.

What we hope to see is that the work has got rid of several bumps – notably the big one in the braking zone for Turn 6, and another large one through Turn 8, which was quite annoying for the drivers. With a smoother surface, we can push up the stiffnesses, compared to last year.

We wouldn’t expect quite the same improvement with F1, but it is a significant change – similar to what we saw on the resurface Monza circuit last year. Grip might be good – but degradation will be high.

Has anything else changed at the Shanghai International Circuit?

They’ve added sausage kerbs at the apex of T3, T11 and T16. The most problematic one will be T16, the final corner, as the cars used to clip that quite a lot – but now you can only use a little bit, not smash the sausage kerbs, so the line will be a bit different through there.

Probably, this means we don't need to set the car up to take so much kerb, so perhaps that will be useful – but equally it will make the corner tighter, which is worse for track limits.

The Shanghai International Circuit has two very, very long straights. Usually that would see the car set-up with skinny wings – but in China teams tend to add plenty of downforce. Why?

Those are long straights, and you would like to have a very efficient, low drag car on them – but there’s also a lot of low-speed corners on this circuit, and the percentage of time where the car is grip-limited is high – one of the highest of the season, in fact, so you need the downforce.

What have you learned about the 2025 tyres at the Bahrain test and in Australia – and how will that impact the race this weekend?

It’s hard to say at this point – one race and one test isn’t enough to have definite ideas about tyre behaviour and I suspect everyone still needs more data points before they’ll be confident in voicing an opinion. Sakhir and Albert Park aren’t really the best circuits for forming opinions either: Bahrain has high macro-roughness and pure overheating, Australia was in the graining region, and we haven’t done that many long runs with a dry tyre.

In China, the resurfacing means it’s a different track roughness to what we experienced last year. Our initial measurements make us think it will have a similar graining risk to Albert Park. We’re expecting hot temperatures this weekend, so that’s likely to require some rear tyre management.

It’ll be a very different limitation to last year, which was more a case of a thermal limit. We were front-limited in the Sprint, moving to rear-limited on Sunday when it was warmer.

We have only a single hour of practice before Sprint Qualifying today – what is the number one thing you’d like to learn about the tyres in this hour?

We need to see the potential for graining, and if the 2025 tyres are more resilient to it. Also, for this year, Pirelli have reduced the step between the C2 and C3 compounds, which are the Hard and Medium tyres here. Last year, the C2 was a good tyre to cope with graining. You could run it for further and it was more resilient than the C3. This year, with a smaller step, it may be less robust. That’s a possibility to be examined – though it’s unlikely anyone will use a C2 in practice.

Does the practice programme allow for any experimentation?

An hour isn’t a long time to practice, so we tend to avoid the experiments that keep the car in the garage for a long time for a set-up change. The nice thing with the Sprint event is that you can change the set-up on Saturday again. We did that last year and found good performance gains from Friday to Saturday. Hopefully we can make the same step again this year.

What sort of opportunities do the new(ish) rules around parc fermé rules present?

You set-up the car a little differently between Sprint Quali and then Qualifying. There are obviously a lot fewer laps in the Sprint, the car is lighter, so you can be a bit more aggressive with your ride-heights.

Also, there’s a lot of data being studied. Back at the MTC, there’s a huge amount of work being done over Friday night, running simulations, and we can feed all of what they find into our set-up after the Sprint.

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