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

We’re into the final race of the season’s first triple header, and it doesn’t get any easier. The Jeddah Corniche Circuit is among the toughest we’ll face all season and a lot of practice will be spent building up confidence around this narrow, but incredibly fast track, as there’s a lot of time to be gained by finding the limits. We’ll also dig into strategy, with several circuits having surprised us in that regard so far this year, and Jeddah’s high number of corners.   

What stands out about the Jeddah Corniche Circuit?

It’s a very high-grip, very smooth street circuit, with close barriers and several blind corners. It doesn’t leave very much margin for error, and it’s a particularly hard circuit for drivers to make small changes in Qualifying.

Finding that last tenth is very, very tricky, because in a lot of places there are exit kerbs. You have to get very close to the painted kerb apex, but the walls are so close that there’s a risk of contact, and the exit kerbs are quite aggressive, so there’s a risk of floor damage too. 

We’re a step softer with the tyre allocation in Jeddah this year. What impact will this have on practice and racing? 

Last year in Jeddah, we had a very low-deg race, while in Qualifying, we could do longer runs and repeated laps. This has prompted Pirelli to take us a step softer for 2025. 

What’s interesting is the C4 tyre – Soft last year, Medium this year – wasn’t a great race tyre. It suffered front-right damage and graining. It’s a different tyre this year, but we have some concerns about degradation to investigate in practice. The C3 was a good race tyre though – and that’s our Hard this year, so we’d still expect the race to be a one-stop. 

Another thing we saw with the C4 in Qualifying last year was that some teams did warm-up laps. It’s less likely we’ll need those in 2025 – but at the same time, we’ve never run a C5 here and won’t know until we try. It’s also less likely we’ll be able to do the push-cool-cool-push, or cool-push-cool-push.  

Jeddah has 27 corners, more than any other circuit on the F1 calendar. Does that create any problems in practice?

It does! It’s really annoying to talk about on the intercom because lots of the winding bits aren’t really corners in the proper sense, and it’s easy to lose track of where you are.

Jeddah is one of F1’s highest average speed circuits, what does that mean for aerodynamics?

Jeddah sits somewhere between our medium and low-downforce rear wings. It’s probably a track for the low-downforce wing, but our aero scans suggest the optimum for lap time is somewhere in between the two. 

Back in 2023, we perhaps ran a little bit too much wing, which left us vulnerable on the straights. So last year, we opted for lower downforce, with the drivers lifting through the high-speed sections. We’d expect to go the same way, but we’ll have to investigate. The low-downforce wing was tested in pre-season and run in practice in Australia, but the likelihood of rain for that race meant we took it off and haven’t raced it yet.  

We’ve reached Round 5 swiftly this year. Are there any updates arriving for the car in Jeddah?  

We may have a couple of very minor aerodynamic test items but nothing significant on the car. We do have a few investigations and experiments however, particularly on Lando’s side.

Given the high daytime temperatures, are FP1 and FP3 useful sessions for race preparation, or will you use them more for general experimentation? 

Because running on the car is so limited in general, we treat them similarly to other weekends – but view the results with more caution. We still used FP1 and FP3 in Bahrain as a representative sessions, and it’ll be the same here – we just have to take it with a pinch of salt that the track temperatures are way too high to understand everything properly. We can do an A/B test during a session, but doing them across sessions is much more difficult here than it would be on a normal daytime schedule. 

Rather like Suzuka, the Jeddah Corniche Circuit has many high-speed sections but one low-speed chicane. What sort of compromise is required there? 

It’s quite similar to Suzuka in that respect, but the difference at Suzuka is that we absolutely have to run the kerbs at the chicane because we would be very slow if we didn’t. Here, you can get away with clipping the kerbs less and using a stiffer set-up to get more benefit in the high-speed sections.

So, in Jeddah, we won’t be compromising quite so much for the low-speed sections of track. This isn’t to say we won’t be riding the kerbs in Jeddah, but it tends to be the medium-speed exit kerbs rather than the chicane that concentrates our attention.

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