© Getty ImagesBulls’ Guide To: New CircuitsWhat’s so different about going somewhere new? Well, quite a bit actually, so read on…
FormulaOnehasacomfortablerelationshipwithitshistory.70yearsandcountingofWorldChampionshipgrandsprixcramsinalotofheritage,andthusthelureofreturningtovenuesyearafteryearisreassuring,butalsoillustrative,whetherthat’sseeingthesimilaritiesbetweenEauRougein1950and2021,orlookingatthestarkdifferencesbetweenZandvoortin1985andthetrackwe’regoingbacktothisweekaftera36-yearhiatus.
With the race team, the comfort of the familiar is of a rather more practical shape. This is a sport dominated by experience and the flow of information: a new venue is something of a black hole.
Max Discussing The Steep Banking Corner© Getty Images
To the outside world, grands prix look like isolated, individual events. In the paddock, or at the factory it usually feels more like a sequence: the races run into one another; the next building on the last, each race adding to an expanding data set as the team becomes more familiar with the car as it completes more laps and samples a wider variety of circumstances, as the correlation with simulation becomes stronger, as the references to previous years get easier to understand.
By this point in the season, the team has a pretty good grip on what to expect: the downforce level at one track should be like the downforce level at another track; the tarmac here is similar to the tarmac there and thus the tyres should react in a similar fashion, and so forth. When you go to a new track, however, the wheels come off that wagon. The reference points vanish. It’s something new.
Preparation is a key task for the race engineering group in any week, endlessly refining plans, either for the next race or one some weeks ahead, geared around ensuring when the car drives out of the garage for FP1 the baseline set-up requires as little alteration as possible to hone it for qualifying and the race.
While this is primarily a question of race pace and tyre life, there are also logistical matters to consider. The team carries a range of bodywork designed to suit every sort of track profile, all kinds of ambient conditions, and every likely race scenario – but the team doesn’t take all of it to every race.
Red Bull Racing Honda Truck© Getty Images
A skinny Spa-spec wing isn’t going to be in the truck for Monaco but, because accidents are likely to happen, every nose box and front wing main plane in the factory will be. Race engineering needs to interact with production engineering to ensure the factory has the right priorities: no point in rushing through high downforce upgrades when there’s a sequence of low-downforce races in the immediate future.
These questions become infinitely more complex when the track is new or as good as new, which is the case for somewhere like Zandvoort. In many respects, this is a step beyond last year’s races at Imola, Istanbul Park and the Nürburgring, where the team’s data was out-dated, and even beyond Mugello and Portimão, for which F1 had no race data, but could at least look at information from other series. Zandvoort, because it’s been resurfaced and reprofiled for this grand prix, is more like going to a recently constructed venue, rather than one shortly to be celebrating its 75th birthday.
New, however, is not the same as unknowable, and preparation for the race follows much the same pattern as any other, with the race engineering and strategy groups running simulations designed to optimise the baseline set-up and provide some indication of how the race may pan out.
The big difference between a well-known circuit and a new track lies in the fidelity of the models used for both the computer sims and the driver sim. For a new circuit, it will be based largely on map data: GPS traces and drawings for the geography, geometry and topography of the layout, plus, hopefully, a track scan to pinpoint the real world bumps and undulations that aren’t on any set of blueprints.
Red Bull Racing Honda HQ In Milton Keynes© Getty Images
Although this might not be as accurate as a sim based off data captured during the previous year’s running, it’s usually good enough to provide a reasonable idea of the fastest way around the circuit. It will leave a lot of work to do at the circuit – but the team will be confident of turning up with the right bits and pieces fitted to the car. Or, at the very least, a greatly reduced selection of bits and pieces that could be useful.
This goes together with various other sources of data, designed to create a fuller picture: things like the long-range weather forecast, which may help with choosing a cooling set-up, information from Pirelli on which tyres they’re bringing, and data from the FIA outlining the length and number of DRS zones. It’s not quite the same as having ten years of race data but it is enough to provide a decent snapshot.
Armed with this, the team can begin making plans. We’ll know, for instance, if the new circuit is going to make overtaking easy or difficult, which in turn affects how much whether the run plan leads more heavily towards learning about one-lap qualifying pace, or invests more heavily in long-run race pace.
With Pirelli’s assistance, the semblance of a strategy may appear, all of which helps the team hit the ground running on Friday morning. Get it right and, rather than wasting time figuring out the basics, the team can instead give the drivers more opportunities to learn the circuit on which they’re qualifying on 28 hours later.
Soft Pirelli Tyres© Getty Images
Operating an F1 team would be a more straightforward endeavour if all you had to worry about was lap-time. The reality is that making the car go quickly is a job that concerns a relatively small subsection of the team. Granted, they’re the ones in the public eye, but the support they get behind the scenes is just as vital. A new venue provides just as many challenges for the garage support staff as it does for race engineering. Ostensibly, our garage looks the same every week – but the reality is that a) it isn’t and b) making it look like it is, takes a great deal of work.
There are performance reasons why we want the front-of-house part of the garage to look the same week-in, week-out. Everyone knows how to move around those dimensions, has their tools to hand and don’t waste valuable seconds jostling for space or trying to find the right set of fasteners. It’s complicated by the fact that no two pit lanes have the same garage dimensions, and thus the standard practice is to carry our own front-of-house shell and assemble our garage within the confines of the garage. Even this can require flexibility.
Some garages may have pillars and other oddities of architecture that have to be negotiated, and our equipment has to be redesigned to work around them. You might be working in a space with an unusually low ceiling or a difficult-to-access power box.
It all has to be considered and it has wider connotations that simply an uncomfortable working environment. Unusually, this feeds back into race engineering: if the presence of a pillar makes the garage opening smaller, will the car still have enough turning radius to emerge from the garage and into the fast lane without hitting the opposite wall? Somebody will have checked that out.
Red Bull Racing Honda Car on Softs© Getty Images
An F1 garage has iceberg-like properties: The shiny bit you can see represents only a small part of the whole. Behind the front of house section, there lies a warren of workshops, storage spaces, server racks, tyre stacks and all manner of racing paraphernalia required to keep the show on the road. It has to be constructed according to a plan, and that plan needs to be created long before the first members of the team arrive on site.
Garage services personnel will have been working long hours in the weeks and months leading up to the race to draw up plans for the space available, because with hundreds of flight cases, tonnes of kit and a clock counting down the hours to the car transporters arriving, you really don’t want to be figuring this stuff out live. It’s more of a concern when your pit lane is in a historic fish market rather than a permanent race track – but only a little bit more.
Beyond that, garage services have all the usual tribulations of working in a new environment, which revolve around access and utilities. It’s a sad reality that most race tracks are organised with the stated aim of stopping people from getting in, so learning the tricks of the track, understanding the locations of everything and figuring out the gate procedures is something teams like to do nice and early. It’s also helpful for the team to understand how reliable a circuit is. The team would never rely on a circuit to work faultlessly, but equally there’s a slightly different approach taken if you know you’re going to a track that operates very efficiently compared to one known for sudden errors. For a new track, the policy is to assume the worst, carry more kit, and often be pleasantly surprised.
Red Bull Racing Honda Treehouse© Getty Images
Feeling your way into a new circuit isn’t only a concern the people working in the garage. Behind this, there’s an awful lot of preparation that goes into moving a hundred or so people to a new location. For the travel office, there’s a great deal of work involved with a new venue. There’s often a new system of visas and freight to assimilate before getting down to the nitty gritty of flights, cars and accommodation. This, as you can imagine, is of varied challenge and never the same twice.
When the calendar takes us to Miami, next year, it won’t be as much of an issue, given the easy availability of flights and hotels; for Zandvoort, it’s rather less straightforward. It isn’t a case of finding accommodation for the whole team in one location, but instead a challenge of salting bits of the team away wherever they’ll fit. There’s often a trade-off between proximity and facilities. There are compromises to be made and they’re geared more towards performance than comfort: tired people make mistakes, and mistakes can be costly.
Whenever we discuss new circuits, the discussion invariably revolves around corners and tyres and weather – but it’s often the human factors that are the most critical.
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work© Getty Images
