Clearly, it’s a circumstance that cost Valtteri dearly and cost the team dearly and one that
we are going to put steps in place to mitigate.
What in the world happened?
A mighty fine question and in fact, this debrief has the most questions we have had so far,
just showing you the level of interest in it and hopefully we can now pick through all
of that for you.
And we’ll go through step by step through this debrief, all of the items that led up
to this performance and what happened during the course of the race.
It’s not one item there is a number across Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
Why did Lewis seem to struggle so much across the weekend relative to Valtteri, and was
it something to do with setup?
If we go back to Thursday, so first of all in Monaco we do our Free Practice on a Thursday
not a Friday, a little bit different to normal and obviously it is a street circuit that
is not used, so it is very dirty, so there is a big ramp in.
But, even so, on Thursday Lewis was actually very happy.
His car was working well and the times he was setting would have put him fastest across
those sessions.
Now, it didn’t look that way because he had a little bit of traffic with Alonso and
Leclerc coming out of the tunnel on his fastest lap, but the performance was there, he was content.
As we went into Saturday that situation inverted.
Whereas Valtteri perhaps was a little bit behind him on Thursday, Valtteri was very
much leading now of our two drivers.
So, what was the difference?
On Thursday we had around 47 to 50 degrees track temperature and it cooled down significantly
by the time we got to Saturday, more around the mid-30s now.
Now, that happens on a number of different circuits but in this particular case, it seems
we just weren’t able to get ourselves into the right working regime with the tyres and
one of the drivers was just slightly happier than the other.
But neither really working the tyres as effectively as we should.
We tried a number of setup items but one of the issues that you have in Monaco is that
it is a confidence builder.
You need laps, you need consistent laps, you need confidence that the car is giving you
everything you want out of it.
If you can carry just a kilometre an hour or two more speed through turn one, two, three
for example you generate just another temperature level, another degree or two which then gives
you more grip through the next sequence.
Conversely, if you don’t have confidence in the car and you don’t trust it, you go
down the spiral in the other way and you lose grip.
The setup between the two cars wasn’t dramatically different as we went into qualifying and race.
Really, what had changed is just we weren’t able to extract everything from the car and
the tyres as we wanted anymore.
Why did Lewis come into the pits that early?
It’s an interesting question, so if l bring you to what we discussed on Sunday morning.
Early, was actually, really, lap 20, lap 18.
That would have been early in Monaco, that would have been a sensible point if you had
to try something or if you are in the lead of the race and you wanted to stop, to fit
the Hard and go to the end.
Lap 30 was what we defined in the morning as late, as very long.
Now, that window was created on purpose by Red Bull and Verstappen.
They pulled away very quickly and then managed the gap such that the field didn’t really
have a gap to pull into anymore.
So, in the case of Valtteri, he had Perez and he also had Vettel behind him in his pit window.
So, we couldn’t stop.
He was really just managing really everyone’s pit stop gaps.
That started to open up as we got towards lap 30, but, now, remember that’s not really
early by definition of the race anymore.
If we go back to 2019 in fact, we took a lap 10 safety car and went to the end.
So, these tyres can very much do that distance.
Relative to Gasly, we had been behind him all of that first stint and clearly we weren’t
going to be able to overtake him on track and there is only two possibilities: there
is an overcut whereby he stops first and you go longer, and an undercut.
That’s very typical, and that’s all the choices we had available to us.
The problem with an overcut is that doesn’t exist until Gasly stops.
He has to stop to present an opportunity for us to have free air in front of us.
He already had a gap to traffic behind, the same gap that we put Lewis into and he wasn’t
taking it, which means he wasn’t terribly convinced that they had to stop first, they
were waiting for us to stop.
I am fairly confident had we waited a lap or two they still wouldn’t have stopped.
That now meant that we had an opportunity, we can wait and hope that perhaps something
happens to his tyres or a situation takes place, or we can take the prerogative and
go for the undercut.
On our calculations we should have come out just ahead of him.
It wasn’t an easy undercut, but it was an achievable undercut.
There were a few issues here.
The first is that in Monaco, compared to other tracks, we don’t really have enough information
to properly define that.
The Hard tyre wasn’t used in FP2, last time we used it was in FP1 on Thursday and there
was no data from 2019 so it’s a little bit of interpolation, a lot of interpolation in
fact, as to what would have happened with that Hard tyre on the out lap.
As things ended up, Lewis came out under two tenths behind Gasly, it was incredibly tight
and close but we were wrong, we didn’t undercut.
The difficulty of warming that Hard tyre on the out lap was such that we didn’t complete
it.
We could have gone longer, so that’s the other opportunity and waited.
There are a few things that pushed us into stopping.
Other teams, Valtteri especially, was starting to struggle quite significantly with the tyres.
You saw in the case of Valtteri that he was pulling Sainz back with him and indeed Vettel
and Perez were much faster than him behind.
That wasn’t the only car that was starting to struggle on the tyres.
Remember, lap 30 is still quite a long way into the race and we had a fear that waiting
with Lewis and waiting another two laps would just put us into a situation where that gap
actually got worse to Gasly.
It’s always harder following a car in front.
As a result on the balance of everything we had available, on the balance that what we
thought we could complete a successful undercut and had we, we would have been fine relative
to Vettel, we decided to do that.
Now, as I stand here clearly, it’s wrong and more so than that we lost multiple positions.
Gasly when he came out didn’t have Lewis’ pace, he was several seconds off and he pulled
Lewis back relative to Vettel who, whilst he wasn’t quick, he was quick enough to
get the overcut on both of those drivers.
How many more laps would Lewis’s tyres done if we had gone longer?
We obviously when the tyres come in, we have the ability to wear check them.
So, you sort of scrape off the surface of dirt and pickup that is on the tyre and then
you can measure specific holes in order to determine how much rubber was remaining.
Now, he had done a really good job of saving his front tyres, they were in a quite good
state, but the rear wasn’t, the rear was somewhat akin to where Valtteri’s was and
that would have been a problem.
And just extrapolating a bit because obviously none of us know, I think we could have done
a couple more laps but certainly we wouldn’t have done ten more.
So, it’s going to be somewhere between those numbers and how fast we would have been is
also difficult to tell.
I think, what’s fair to say is that the Red Bull’s end of stint pace, especially
with Perez, is something that was outstanding relative to the field and relative to ourselves
and that wouldn’t have been achievable given the wear we had.
What happened to Valtteri’s front right wheel?
The whole process is one and a half seconds, that’s it.
That’s the process of removing a nut, changing a wheel and refitting the new nut.
As a result of that, as I am sure you can tell, the margin for error is very small and
if just the slightest problem happens, it slows the stop down or potentially, in an
absolute disastrous case, this happens.
So, let’s go through a little bit more detail about what the nuts are and why we use the
systems we do.
So, our nuts are what we call captive, they are maintained within the wheel and the tyre,
so as the wheel comes off the nut goes with it.
And this is what our nuts look like.
You can see this ridged area around here and that is where the socket will connect into
and effectively apply force.
This is a brand-new nut, so you can see there is no wear and it hasn’t been in a race
car yet.
When the gun connects, and it removes the nut, such that the nut is now lose and the
wheel comes off the car, this is what we would typically expect to see.
So, you can see some wear patterns now.
The reason why is because this nut has to hold a wheel to the car such it can cope with
5g forces in braking and laterally as well.
It’s a huge amount of force going through the axle and the nut and clearly we can never
have it coming lose.
So, the gun is an incredibly powerful gun, such that you can actually see the mechanics
having to restrain themselves holding themselves to the ground otherwise they get rotated with
it at the same time.
It’s an impact force and what happens is the nut typically loosens in four or five
impacts against it.
A hammering action.
Now, what happened is we came on slightly angled, so when the socket was now connected
to the nut, it slightly angled relative to it and as a result of that, now instead of
distributing the load across all of the nut it was across a small section and that tore
the metal clean off and in fact all of the metal was now removed from the nut.
As a result of that, the nut was in place and we were unable to remove it.
That’s a brief overview of what happened.
Clearly, it’s a circumstance that cost Valtteri dearly and cost the team dearly and one that
we are going to put steps in place to mitigate.
Was there a consideration to send Valtteri back out, for example changing three of the
tyres to another set of Soft tyres or fitting perhaps Hard tyres on three of the tyres and
keeping one Soft?
Sadly, we couldn’t have done that.
We could have and put Valtteri out on track, but we would have been disqualified.
You have to under the regulations run both sets, two different sets of dry specification
tyres in the race and also all four corners must match in terms of what compound they
are and we would have triggered a disqualification as a result of carrying on that way.
It’s an obvious rule if you think about it.
In Monaco for example if it was just an extra pit stop or 30 second penalty you may chose
to never come in, but it’s there to expressly cover that circumstance.
Did you manage to remove that front right wheel from Valtteri’s car?
It’s now Monday afternoon whilst we are doing this filming and the car is on its way
back in a truck.
We expect it here later on this evening.
I am fairly confident that by some time on Tuesday we would have that front right wheel removed.
We did certain steps in Monaco to try and remove it, some during the pit stop, also
some just afterwards, ultimately there we concluded that to remove that nut we were
going to need some fairly heavy equipment and specialist equipment and that would be
better done here in the factory.
More so, it allows us an opportunity to do an autopsy on it to understand really how
that nut was worn and gather some clues to allow us to do a better job going forward
in the future.
As a result of that we left the wheel on the car and packaged the car back into the truck
to bring it back here directly.
What are some of the positives you can take away from this weekend?
I’ll start with our core and our ethos within this team, and it’s one really of standing
up in the case of adversity, the one that accepts that faults and failures are going to happen.
What’s actually really important is how the team cements itself after that.
How do you pick apart the details and learn from it and more importantly become stronger
at the next event and from then onwards.
That culture underpins this team and what happened this weekend in Monaco will only
serve to strengthen that.
Already this morning, everyone is doing their utmost to understand every single bit of performance
data and reliability and pit stop data, such that we move forwards as an entity and as a group.
Those positives are incredibly powerful and ultimately, they are the ones that gel the
team together such that you can win multiple championships together.
So, there is a whole heap of positives just in that but more so than that, Valtteri had
the pace this weekend to fight for a podium position.
He had the pace in qualifying to be top three and even if Leclerc was in there in the race,
he would have still had the car to put him on the podium.
This was one of our weakest tracks, if not perhaps and hopefully the weakest.
We know that we are going to be stronger at some tracks going forward across the season
and the positives are that even at this outlier track, at this poor track for us, if we can
walk away with podium type scoring potential it means we have a chance to fight for the championship.
We had a question coming in stating that we have one disastrous race per season and a
sensible follow up question, which is, how are we going to mitigate against what happened
in Monaco, how are going to move forward from this?
So, starting point is I think it is a fair observation that one race a season ends up
being very poor.
I think for me that is just an indication that we are a world championship fighting
team, we are on the limit of pushing every boundary.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s car performance or pit stops or human endurance or the drivers
taking everything they can to risk everything for every point that is available to them.
When you are there, you will make mistakes.
What’s important isn’t the mistakes that you make, it’s the corrective action that
happens afterwards and it is how the team bonds following that.
So, to answer the question, we will treat this race as we will every race.
We break everything down into detail, we separate into various groups in the factory to understand
what we could have all done better.
Even at Barcelona there is items for example that we could improve upon and it’s no different
in Monaco, there is just more of them.
And it’s how you correct and move forward with all the little details that ultimately
corresponds to how the car will be and how the team will be across the remainder of the season.
Thank you very much for all of your questions and we look forward to answering them again
after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.