I think it’s no secret that the Spanish Grand Prix at Catalunya is met with apprehension
each year as races there don’t tend to produce exciting races very reliably, shall we say.
Let’s have a little look at some of the things that contribute to the Barcelona track’s
slight dearth of excitement. Firstly, Barcelona is the main testing track
for all Formula 1 teams. Nowadays with such restricted testing, all
of the proper, on-track pre-season preparation takes places over 8 full days at Barcelona.
This ends up with each team doing probably 800 to 1000 laps of the circuit each before
the season even properly begins. While the temperature is a lot lower in winter
testing than they’ll find once they get to the actual Spanish Grand Prix event, one
thing is clear: the teams gather a huge amount of data on the track and will have more knowledge
about how to approach this race than any other. There have been race weekends in the past
where Friday practice has been very disrupted due to bad weather and the teams have been
unable to gather information about the track like they normally would through free practice.
Situations like this have forced them to fudge their race preparation programme somewhat
and try and do the best they can in the short practice session on the Saturday before the
cars setups are locked down for qualifying. As a consequence, qualifying and the race
following a disrupted Friday have tended to be a little more chaotic, a little more seat-of-the-pants
and somewhat less predictable. To the extent that there have long been murmurings of significantly
chopping down free practice to limit the teams’ knowledge going into competitive sessions.
With Winter testing at Barcelona, though - well, that’s quite the opposite. The teams go
in with so much data that, barring disruptive weather events like rain, wind or super hot
weather, almost nobody will be particularly surprised about their own running through
the weekend. Part of the reason you tend to get a more
‘Noah’s Ark’ style grid and performance level among the teams is that the teams aren’t
able to mix it up through canniness or cunning. Everyone is bringing their A-game to Spain.
So then the debate becomes, should we be testing at tracks that we go racing at? Particularly,
should we do so much testing at tracks like Barcelona. I’d argue no, but then we have
scenarios like Abu Dhabi where they all test immediately after the race because it’s
super cheap as everyone is already there. There’s a trade off there.
OK so that’s problem one. Too much data from too much testing. Moving winter testing
to some non-championship track like Jerez might help with this a little.
So now let’s look at the nature of the track itself, which is an interesting one as it’s
not like Monaco and Hungary where everything is too slow and narrow to overtake with ease.
And it’s not particularly dirty or without any decent straight. No, it comes down to
the character of the track. Let’s have a look at the Barcelona track.
Part of the reason it’s so good for testing is it has a nice mixture of high speed corners,
mid speed corners and low speed corners. And it does have straights with significant braking
points at the end, so it’s got a bit of everything really when looking to explore
the balance, traction, speed, stability and tyre behaviour.
But the number and position of the mid-to-high speed corners are what really cause a lot
of the problems - because with such a huge pit straight you think it would be a little
easier to get fighting with the car ahead. Let’s do back to an old classic bugbear
- driving in the dirty air of the car ahead. As we know, the aerodynamic parts of Formula
1 cars throw all the air away from the bodywork with huge amounts of energy. The chassis manipulates
the air and sends it spinning and soaring in all directions - for more details on this
you can watch videos on aerodynamics and vortices. Obviously if you’re on a straight this is
great for the car behind because the leading car has got rid of all the air for you. You
now don’t have to waste as much energy pushing through it yourself - and at F1 speeds, air
feels thick like water - it drags you back a lot.
Now the thing about mid and high speed corners - particularly these long, long ones like
at Barcelona - are aero-limited. This essentially means your ability to generate downforce is
what limits your speed through the corner. If you’ve got a good chassis, good setup
and nice clean air in front of you, you can pelt it through the corner pretty fast.
If your wings are inefficient or you happen to be in the wake of a car ahead, your ability
to create downforce is reduced because that leading car has pushed all the air away. Air
you need to work the wings and bodywork into generating downforce.
It was said a couple of times this weekend that the wake of a car - the significant disruption
to the air behind - could be as long as five seconds. As in, a car five seconds behind
the car in front will start to feel the reduced aero effects of sitting in its wake.
Now, it’s more likely that this is closer to three or four seconds, but that’s still
pretty significant. When a car is as close as one second to the
car ahead in Spain, they lose about 6% downforce. This rises to 12% if they’re lucky enough
to get within half a second. So you can see why gaps between cars start
to spread out. When following in the disturbed wake of another
car, your own downforce takes a hit - particularly at the front wing, the first part of your
car to work the air. Reduced front end downforce results in understeer,
when the front of the car can’t “bite” - can’t grip as effectively as it should.
The means the front starts to drift wide as the car turns in and the driver needs to slow
down or sail off the outside of the corner. So the result is, the following car having
to take these corners slower than the car ahead, losing time and falling behind.
Now, the big, meaty main straight at Barcelona unfortunately has this aero-limited high speed
corner leading onto it, so it’s very hard to follow the car ahead closely enough to
be able to chase them down the pit straight. You’re on the back foot before you can think
about attacking. It’s similar down the other DRS zone on
the back straight. You have to plough through this fast chicane and this fairly flat-out
right hander, Campsa, before you get to it so it’s hard to keep up with your rival
at the point where you need to overtake. Now, they have tried to fix some of Barcelona’s
track problems. La Caixa and Europcar were changed because those parts of the track were
getting a bit too fast for the available run off, and at La Caixa in particular was transformed
into something a little more… “overtakey” See, until these two changes, Barcelona didn’t
really have a point where the cars hit a hardcore braking point that turned into a tight corner
and a traction zone. If you have a heavy braking zone, you can try and get alongside the car
ahead by being defter on the brakes. You can then try and position yourself for the launch
out of the corner and outgun them up the track. But Barcelona has a lot of sweeping corners.
While turn 1, for example is preceded by somewhat heavy braking, it’s still a fast turn and
you don’t get the full stop-start in momentum that opens up overtaking opportunities.
So there end up being very few lines through turns one and two and, as cars need to cling
on through a speedy corner, they end up drifting into each other quite frequently if they end
up vaguely side by side. See the two Haases, or Norris vs Stroll during the race. `
So, with a lot of testing data under their belts and a lot of mid-to-high speed corners
it’s easy to see how these races can become a little processional. With Barcelona looking
on shaky ground for renewal perhaps the problem will solve itself, but even if the F1 circus
travels elsewhere, we must be careful to learn from the tough races at Barcelona and think
about doing things differently. Max Verstappen has already raised concerns
that the Zandvoort circuit looking to replace Barcelona is not really suitable for close
racing in F1. At least not in its current form…
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