Hi, I am James Vowles and I am here to answer your questions on the Turkish Grand Prix.
It’s a great question.
One of the things I like about other series, for example the Le Mans 24 Hours, is you keep
the car in exactly the same state as it finished the 24-Hour race as a memento.
Now, for me seeing the car covered in the confetti and the celebrations is just really
the icon that really illustrates the thousands of hours of work that everyone has put in
for this championship and the hard work being paid off.
Just, it’s iconic and I wish we could keep it in that state.
As it turns out, that race car has to do Bahrain twice and Abu Dhabi, so I think there is still
someone picking bits out as we speak.
The circumstances created in the Turkish GP qualifying are unique and haven’t happened
either in 2020 previously or for many years prior to that.
You need both a freshly resurfaced circuit, which in the case of the Turkish GP that was
done just weeks prior to us turning up, and you also need very cool conditions without
much running on dry tyres, so the circuit can’t grip up and change.
On Friday the lap times evolved by over ten seconds, to provide an idea to how much that
circuit was evolving, and it continued to evolve both in qualifying, even though we
were on Wet tyres, and during the race.
The significance of that is that it’s such a different circumstance to normal, the teams
had to adapt very quickly to get the tyres working, to generate enough energy, to generate
enough temperature and we for sure were on the bad side of that compared to our competitors.
Both Racing Point and Red Bull were clearly class-leading in that circumstance, but also
in FP3 Ferrari were there or there about able to generate temperature.
So, if you go through qualifying step by step, it will highlight the issues.
In Q1 when cars were on the Wet tyre doing multiple laps and we weren’t poor relative
to the field at that point, in fact both of our cars were in the top five, Verstappen
who went out on Intermediate tyres was nearly out of the session.
But at the end of Q1, after multiple red flags, we saw the true extent of the problem.
All teams, all drivers had just one timed out on Wets to make it work.
Verstappen’s time was incredibly quick relative to our own.
We just can’t generate the energy and temperature in the tyres on one lap.
Furthermore, whenever you see these big discrepancies between drivers and teams, not tenths but seconds.
It’s not traditionally car performance that’s dominating this anymore.
It’s about tyre temperature and getting the tyres into the correct window.
In Q2 it was a long run on Wets for everyone and again, we were offset by Verstappen by
two seconds.
Not the differences we were seeing at the end of Q1 but even so a large, large performance offset.
And in Q3, Stroll did exactly the same run plan we did, with one timed lap on Wets followed
by two timed laps on Intermediate tyres after it was proven to be faster.
And yet there was five seconds difference between the two teams.
So if you dig into why, it is all about the energy that you are putting into a tyre, which
the engine will produce energy as you turn and rotate the rear tyres and generate slip,
the brakes will generate energy, both front and rear, and again that will go into the tyre.
But obviously the ground is wet, and the rain is taking away energy from the tyres continuously,
so it is all about putting more energy in than is being taken away by the conditions.
The faster you are in certain parts of the track, the more energy you generate and the
more temperature you generate, but where we were with our car in those conditions was
offset relative to the leaders.
So much so we couldn’t generate the performance required.
We don’t build a car for these conditions.
We’re building a car that works on tracks in a normal range of temperatures that we
are expecting, be it wet or dry, and clearly we ran out of tools and authority to be able
to change what we needed to, in this occasion to generate the tyre temperature.
We don’t have all the answers, but we are reviewing exactly what we would do now with
a new set of components or setup changes should this circumstance appear again.
It is unlikely to in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, the two circuits that are coming up towards
the end of the year, but it’s all likelihood could reappear again in the near future and
we need to be prepared.
We had a question around the downforce and why it didn’t help?
The truth is: it did.
The more downforce you have, the easier it is to generate energy on the tyres in those conditions.
But the simple matter of fact is it wasn’t enough to overcome the other energy losses
that we were experiencing.
So, the more downforce definitely put us in a better case than some of the other teams
behind us, but not to a sufficient level that it suddenly changed how the tyres were operating.
On dry tyres we have a huge amount of experience from previous circuits and we are able to
put that together and understand how it should perform at a new circuit.
We don’t have that same luxury on the Intermediate tyre or the Wet tyre.
We have the odd lap here and there from circuits where perhaps it’s been a little bit damp,
but what we need is sustained running in wet conditions in order to truly understand those tyres.
The difference though is the Intermediate and Wet tyre haven’t changed dramatically
in the last few years.
So, we are able to use data from a few years ago, including Hockenheim 2019 for example,
and use that to understand what we believe the tyre should be doing here.
Clearly there is a lot more interpolation though, from that data.
We have a ballpark idea of where the pressure should be, what the temperatures should be,
but that’s not enough to truly understand how that tyre will perform.
So, if you actually talk about what happens on the Intermediate tyre, it may help to understand
a little bit more.
As the track dries and as you run an Intermediate tyre, it starts to tear off the rubber that
is on the surface.
It starts with groves that are there to clear water, but clearly in this case it is just
a damp track, there was no water left not sufficient you need to clear that away anymore.
You run it down to a slick and that slick is actually like a very low temperature Soft
tyre, if you will it is a grippy Soft rubber compound that just works.
Therefore, it is not a bad thing to run the Intermediates down.
When you stop and you fit fresh Intermediates they come out of the blankets warm and they’ll
perform well for a few laps, but how well they perform across the reminder of the run
is really subject to how they wear in those conditions and that can be tricky at times,
which is what you saw with a few of our competitors but not all.
For us, it was clear that running them down to slick was the key.
We didn’t have any further rain forecast on the radar and actually that tyre would
perform very well, and it did. It held on.
In terms of reliability and where we were going, obviously in the wet the energy is
much, much lower.
Clearly Turkey is a difficult track, but the speed you are going at in these damp conditions
you are not generating anything near the loads we would do on dry tyres.
We were comfortable that we would be able to continue but should we start to see issues
or troubles or drop off from the tyre, we would have reacted immediately and come in with Lewis.
The largest concern we had was actually heavy rain or certainly rain forecast across the
last few laps of the race.
We could then, if you imagine we are just on slicks now, be in real trouble if the rain started to fall.
Let’s take the worst case, condition Lewis is going through Turn 1, we have to do the
entire lap in either light or heavy rain with tyres that are really, fundamentally slicks
now and that could have been an issue.
That’s one of the reasons why we called Lewis in to box across the last few laps,
we weren’t concerned about the tyres making it to the end, we were just concerned about
some rain that was appearing on the horizon.
Fortunately, the rain didn’t appear, and Lewis was able to cross the line and take
his seventh World Championship.
We had a decision to make with Valtteri towards the end of the race which is do we stop and
fit another Intermediate tyre or do we stop and try a dry Soft tyre in the conditions.
There were a few issues, the first is the track was still damp in places.
There was still water in the stones, and we were on the difficult side of getting the
tyres to work as you saw from qualifying and probably not ideal to be the first car to risk it.
The second is that this is the sort of risk you make when you can make positions and points
out of it, but Valtteri was 14th.
He was a pit stop gap behind Gasly who himself was a pit stop gap behind Kvyat.
Everyone in front could have reacted to Valtteri and we would have gained no positions as the result.
So, now you are introducing risk, which is the tyres don’t work and we have to do an
additional pit stop, followed by the fact that we were struggling already with the temperature
as it is and the gain would have been minimal or none, not even points.
So, to risk the car and to risk putting the wrong tyre on with no gain in terms of points
is not how we would operate generally.
When you go to a new track, you are not really too sure what the surface looks like and it
has a huge impact on what the lap times will be, how the track evolution will be and how
the tyres will perform.
We didn’t know, nor did any teams, what the track surface at the Turkish Grand Prix
was going to be.
Certainly, us and other teams, you could see us experimenting with downforce levels and
how to get the tyres working on Friday, a clear indication that our normal level of
simulation wasn’t able to cope with the differences we were experiencing.
You have to be a lot more agile and responsive to what you are seeing on track, so the tyres
will work in a different way and the car will work a different way in terms of balance and
you are continuously tuning between runs, whereas perhaps at another circuit like Bahrain,
that we are going to, we have a lot more information and data, it is easier to predict what will
happen with the tyres and track.
After the race, especially a wet race, you can see the car is covered in debris, dirt, etc.
We do go around the car and take photos of all elements of it and a video around the
car as well, just to make sure we log and document it.
But this isn’t to understand aerodynamically how the car has been performing, it’s to
understand what damage we have and the state of the car at the end of a Grand Prix.
Clearly in the case of Valtteri, it was an essential piece of data that allowed us to
understand how his car was during the race.
He sustained damage after an accident on the opening laps with a Renault and he also picked
up a bit of that debris and it ended up in the bargeboard, but at the end of the race
we are able to document that and have a review of it so we can in the future go back to it
and our aerodynamicists can have a look and correlate the losses we were seeing relative
to the damage that was visible on the car.
Thank you very much for all of your questions.
It’s been a privilege and an honour answering them about such a special Grand Prix
and such a memorable occasion.
We now look forward to answering your questions after the Bahrain Grand Prix.