It was one of the most thrilling, nail-biting,
sort of, chest-bursting experiences that I have ever had at a race track.
We’ve had a question asking us whether we have made any changes to the way we plan our sessions
given that the free practice sessions are now shorter than they used to be last year. Well, the
simple answer is yes: All the teams have had to make changes because going from an hour and a half
to an hour for those sessions makes quite a big difference. Last year,
we had the luxury at the start of sessions to wait for a few minutes, maybe ten minutes sometimes,
to let other teams clean the track and get the track in a state where we can then
start to work on our programme. That luxury is gone with this change. You need to start
when the session starts and then you need to keep the runs coming because that lack of half an hour
means you really do need to keep your car out on the track as much as possible. And the time in
between runs gets quite compressed. We reckon we had something like six or seven minutes for doing
the changes in between runs which puts quite a large limitation on the sort of things you
can contemplate doing in the session. There is not really any time for freestyling or
changing direction in the session itself. You have to have a pre-programme plan, you have to stick to
it and you have to execute it cleanly. It’s quite high pressure, but it’s also quite exciting and
I think probably a better product for the fans because the action on the track is always there.
We had a rather unusual question come in. It just said: Interesting facts? I’m not really
quite sure what to say so I will just pluck a thing at random. I was reading this weekend
about deep sea divers, saturation divers who breathe a mixture of oxygen and helium,
helium so that they don’t get poisoned by having to breathe too much oxygen and too much nitrogen
at very high pressures. And I think most people know that this diving gas, this mix of gasses
makes everyone sound like Donald Duck when they are speaking, that is fairly common knowledge.
What I didn’t know, but I read at the weekend, was that these deep sea diving companies use a sort of
helium descrambler to allow them to be able to understand what they are saying. It actually
lowers the timbre of the voice and turns it back to normal, from the sort of Donald Duck sound back
to a normal human voice. So, helium descramblers, they are my interesting factoid of the day.
The question we have been asked is ‘why we brought two sets of Hard tyres to the
race instead of one Medium and one Hard tyre like our competitors Red Bull did?’
The honest answer is that this is a very finely balanced decision. There isn’t, like,
one of them is a no brainer, the other one is a completely moronic choice. It’s a matter of
not taste, but each one has a slight advantage over the other in certain circumstances.
So, the Medium tyre all things being equal will be slightly faster over a certain number of laps,
but it will die sooner. It will eventually degrade and fall off a cliff sooner than the Hard. The
Hard tyre is just a whisker slower but it will be fairly bulletproof for a large number of laps.
So, those two different characteristics give you different options. We judged, and you have to
remember we were only at this track a few months ago in 2020, we judged that the pace difference
between the Hard and the Medium was going to be sufficiently small that we valued the increased
life a little higher than we valued that shade of extra pace that the Medium tyre gave you.
And we intended to use that extra life to make us, to put ourselves in a position where we could be
brave at the point where we did our stops. We know in Bahrain that it is one of the tracks that has
the most powerful undercuts. You need only to get within about two seconds of the car ahead
and if you stop one lap sooner then you can jump past using an undercut. Now, if you know that what
you have got tucked up in the garage is a nice set of unused Hard tyres and you know that that
set of tyres can go deep, deep into the race then it gives you the confidence to make that
undercut move, to dive in the pits and stop really quite early in the race and to hopefully use that
undercut to jump past. If you are sitting on a Medium tyre with someone hard up behind you and
you are worried that they are going to undercut you, but all you know is you’ve got Mediums
in the garage, then you are nervous about diving in the pits too early in the race because you know
that your tyres maybe are going to struggle if they have to run too long a stint. So, we placed
the value on the stint length and it was that that we then used in the race, admittedly in quite an
extreme way, to make sure that we used the length of the stint to our advantage and it was that that
allowed us to first undercut and then protect against an undercut having seized the lead with
that very, very aggressive early stop and long final stint that Lewis did to hold on for the win.
So, it is a matter of taste, a matter of choice but we chose it for those reasons and
then we exploited that opportunity to sneak a win in a very, very closely fought race.
Was a three stop race ever considered or was two stop always our plan? I think probably this
might have been a sort of in the minds of some of the commentators as they were watching the race,
when we made our second stop because there was still, I think,
28 laps to go at that point and they thought this team looks like it is setting up for a three stop
race but the honest answer is absolutely no. Three stop would have been instant death at that track,
far, far too slow a strategy. We were just making the absolute maximum of what the
Hard tyre could offer us, and three stops was never something that we considered.
One of Valtteri’s pit stops didn’t go so well. We lost a lot of time in it. What happened?
When the car came into the pit stop box, Valtteri came in very neatly, positioned the car neatly
and well, which is always a help for the pit crew, but sadly one of the gun men went onto the wheel,
started to disengage the nut, loosened the nut but then started to withdraw the wheel gun just
a little bit too soon before the nut had spun off its thread and because it was still offering
some resistance at that point, as he withdrew the wheel gun, the socket on the wheel gun started to
disengage from the nut and then started to spin round, we call it machining the nut because it
starts to chip away at the edges of the nut and destroy the nut, a bit like when you are
using a screwdriver and you don’t have it lined up properly, and you start to sort of damage the
screwdriver slot. So, as he pulled away the gun machined away at the nut and it didn’t actually
come off its mountings. He went back in to deal with it but the gun recognises or is designed to
recognise when it has done a gunning off action and it automatically shuttles the gun so that it
is then in doing up mode and so when he went back on to finish the job of taking the wheel nut off,
the gun is now in doing up mode and instead of undoing the nut, it is doing it up again
and the subsequent sort of follow on mess of that is what causes something which is normally
a beautiful two-second pit stop, causes it to then collapse into something that haemorrhages
lap time and seconds in the pit lane. But all of it was caused by that initial
misplacing of the wheel gun, machining the nut as the wheel gun came off.
If Valtteri’s second pit stop had not gone wrong, were we positioning Valtteri as a sort of traffic
jam to hold up Max in his pursuit of Lewis? The answer to that is no. The stop lap that we chose
for Valtteri was the lap that gave Valtteri his best chance of getting past Max. Valtteri had
a nice set of Hard tyres in the garage, as did Max, but the Red Bulls had shown some nervousness
about making long stints. They had stayed out on the track when Lewis had
managed to undercut them earlier in the race. And so, we knew that by stopping Valtteri when we
chose, we would present Max with a dilemma. After a couple of laps of Valtteri being on those new
tyres, if he had a good pit stop, he would have already been threatening Max for the undercut.
Max would have had to come in to protect against Valtteri and that would have allowed
Valtteri to be right up against Max and able to fight with him for position. If Max had
continued to show the sort of nervousness that Red Bull had exhibited about doing long stints,
then it would have allowed Valtteri to get past him with an undercut if Max chose not to cover him
and that would have placed Valtteri ahead of Max on the road and with the same sort of chance that
Lewis had of defending against Max later in the race. So, the time when we chose to stop Valtteri
would have given Valtteri his best chance of getting in front of Max. It didn’t work out of
course because the pit stop was too slow and that is a very sad thing for Valtteri, who had shown
extremely good pace up to that point in the race and then showed good pace afterwards recovering
from that slow pit stop and finally taking the fastest lap of the race as a consolation.
So, it’s a shame he didn’t get a chance to show how that strategy would have unfolded.
We have received a question asking, did we feel in the garage as nervous as the questioner did
in those closing laps of the race. I don’t know of course how nervous you, the questioner,
felt during those last laps of the race, but I absolutely know how we felt it was one of the most
thrilling, nail-biting, sort of, chest-bursting experiences that I have ever had at a race track.
We have all sorts of tools at the track that make predictions for us, that show us
how the tyres are wearing, what the likelihood is of holding a place, not holding a place and
we have the timing screens like everyone else and we have the television like everyone else.
But all those tools were of no help, they were making a prediction that was changing with about
every two or three seconds, it was saying Lewis was going to win, then it would change its mind
and say that Max was going to win but honestly you didn’t need the software to know how tight it was
and all of us were holding our breath, crossing our fingers, crossing our toes and just hoping
with everything we had that Lewis would be able to hang on to the end. That he did so in such style,
that he did so with such inch perfect positioning of his car at Turn 4 when Max had that one go at
him, that he did so with that degree of class just added to the thrill of it all and when he
finally crossed the line there was an outbreak of mass hysteria in our garage with the utter, utter
delight of it. Last year, we managed to win lots of races with a very strong set of performances
but there will be very few races as memorable as the one that we enjoyed yesterday in Bahrain.
Pizza with pineapple on top? I am really the wrong guy to ask this.
There are many people on the race team who are very into their food, but I am much more of a
sort of eat to live type of person than a live to eat sort of fellow. So, I like all pizza,
pineapple, no pineapple as long as it is full of carbs and fat I will get it down my throat.
Thank you very much for all your questions and we will be back in three weeks-time
after the next race in Imola.