Hi, I am James Allison.
As you can probably imagine, we have had an absolute bag full of questions after the Sakhir
Grand Prix and I am here to answer some of them.
For two races running in Bahrain, Valtteri has not had the best of starts.
Why was that?
It’s actually rather different from the first Bahrain Grand Prix to the second, the
so called Sakhir Grand Prix.
In the first one, he was just a victim of not having good grip available in the grid
box where he was situated.
So that P2 grid box in that weekend in the first Grand Prix just didn’t offer good grip
How do we know that?
Well, we look across at his teammate, at Lewis in that first Grand Prix and we compare how
they drop the clutch.
Both drivers dropped the clutch at the start of the race and Lewis actually dropped his
clutch deeper, so with the clutch biting more strongly, so you would expect if anything
that Lewis’ car would have had more of a tendency to spin the wheels because he dropped
the clutch more deeply into the biting point, but Valtteri, despite the fact that that clutch
was only lightly engaged, still the wheels lit up and we had wheelspin away from the
line, which reduces the rate of acceleration.
Because the actual amount of grip in that position on that day was less than his teammate’s
starting from the pole box.
Second Grand Prix: When we had Valtteri in the pole slot and George in that unfavoured P2 slot.
How come then Valtteri had the unlucky poor start and George the lightning quick one?
Well, actually both drivers dropped their clutch in the right way, both got pretty good
starts, they both had a decent acceleration and what made the difference was simply that
George’s reaction time was quicker.
George had a very, very quick reaction time on that day, which meant that his car started
to move sooner and although these things only look tiny and fractional at the point where
the lights go out, by the time you get to the end of the straight, that fractional advantage
has built to quite a big difference which is what gave him the advantage going around
the first corner.
A few people have asked us, why we left Valtteri out for a few laps at that first set of stops
around about mid-race distance.
Why, having stopped George, did we not bring in Valtteri on the following lap?
Instead we left him out there for four laps, before giving him his pit stop in turn.
It’s a simple answer really, we stopped George first because he was the lead driver
and that’s the way we go about our racing.
Why did we not follow it in the second lap with Valtteri?
Well, it was actually to give Valtteri more opportunity, because in that period after
the lead driver has stopped and the trail driver is still out there on the old tyres.
Although those tyres are old and therefore not as quick as the new tyres that his teammate
is now wearing, there is a big potential advantage, if in that window after the first stop of
the lead car, there is a safety car.
If a safety car were to happen to come out in those laps then it would give an enormous
advantage to the second stopper, because if Valtteri, had a safety car come out, would
have been able to get a very cheap stop and therefore catapult himself
past George into first place.
So, we left it as long as we dared giving Valtteri as many laps possible of this safety
car opportunity, in case one was to arrive.
In the event it didn’t arrive and he wasn’t able to capitalise upon that and came out
a few laps after George on rubber that was fresh and with fewer laps to put on it than
George would and as a consequence he was then able to start eating back in to the gap between
the two cars in the subsequent laps.
If you watched the race you would have heard George complaining about loss of power at
various stages, suffering from some gremlins in our PU on George’s car.
What were these?
Well, on, I think it was, the lap to the grid we saw that one of the sensors in the exhaust
system of the car started to suffer some misbehaviour and that misbehaviour meant that it just wasn’t
giving the sort of consistent signal that we require in order for the normal operation
of the power unit and this erroneous sensor value was starting to make the power fluctuate.
Now, normally when we have these sensors start to misbehave the way that we deal with it
is that we tell the car ‘just stop paying attention to that sensor please, it’s not
reliable and use a back-up strategy instead’.
The back-up strategy will not be as powerful as the main strategy that is based around
a healthy sensor, but it will be a lot better than if it tries to base it’s
input on this dodgy sensor.
Quite early on in the race, we told George to effectively switch off that sensor to tell
the car ignore what that sensor is telling me and then the car would use
this back-up mode instead.
That’s what we did quite early on in the race.
Now, the problem was that the action that we had got prepared for being able to turn
that sensor off and ignore it.
Annoyingly, it also had the effect of making the car ignore another sensor.
Now, it shouldn’t have done that.
It should have only ignored the one we were interested in ignoring and by effectively
ignoring both of these sensors we bought ourselves another problem.
And that other problem was that the second sensor that was being ignored is one that
the FIA is interested in because it’s one of the sensors they use to monitor
the legality of the car.
Specifically, how much electrical energy are you discharging in any given lap.
So, the FIA could understand what had happened but clearly, they would much prefer it if
this second sensor was still online and still doing its business as it should be.
Now, a little bit later on in the race, the first sensor, the one that caused us the problem,
stopped being just dodgy and looked like it had died a natural death all on its own.
At that point we don’t any longer need to tell the car to ignore it because it is actually
dead, dead, rather than sort of on a bit, off a bit.
So, it was in our interest to switch the system back to normal so that the second of these
two sensors, the one that the FIA want to look at, comes back online as well.
So we did that and then for a while the car was basically behaving okay, it was not relying
on the dead sensor, it was working in a back-up mode and the second of these two sensors was
giving the stream that the FIA want to see for monitoring the electrical discharges but
then, and this was probably the radio message that was sort of most obvious to the people
watching the race, at a certain point in the race after the pit stop, the sensor that had
died, or we thought had died, had a little bit of a sort of Lazarus moment
and came back from the dead.
At that point it started to make the power fluctuate again and it needed to be turned
off a second time bringing back the other issue with the second sensor that we had at
the beginning of the race.
All of this was just an enormous pain in the neck for the guys in the garage to manage
and also for George to manage.
A hassle and a worry that involved him having to do a bunch of steering wheel switchery
to try to get the car in a position where the PU could run happily with the mixture
of sensors that were left and functioning correctly by later in the race.
Didn’t actually cause us much lost time, didn’t actually cause us much lost power
but it was a nuisance and a worry, handled rather well by a guy driving our car for the
first time that weekend.
With our cars in such a commanding position in the race and with us clearly being the
quickest cars out there, why was it that at the safety car brought out by the Aitken incident,
why did we feel the need to do a pit stop at all and indeed why did we
double stack the cars?
Well, the reason we chose to do it is that Sakhir has a very rough surface to the asphalt.
That rough surface eats away at the tyres and makes them go slower with each passing
lap and after you have done a handful of laps the tyres are in much worse state than they
are when they are brand-new.
Although we were like for like the quickest car on the track, so if we were on the same
age tyres as everybody else, we were definitely the quickest car out there.
By the time we would be on very worn tyres and maybe some competitors behind us on brand
new tyres, if they chose to make a pit stop behind the safety car, then the competitiveness
of our car would not look so shiny.
We were well in the lead, we had not just a safety car worth of gap between us and the
car in third place, we had a whole pit stops worth of free space behind us and so there
was a lot of time for us to come in and do a very relaxed pit stop with our first car
and our second car on the same lap.
Even though we had to make the call quite late, because when the safety car came out
it was not very far from the entrance to the pits, there was a lot of time to get that
pit stop executed, get safely back out onto the track and then be on fresh tyres for the
remainder of the race and completely protected by any risk that we would be on old tyres
with marauding competitors behind us on fresh rubber.
Given the position in the race that we were in, the decision to stop was not a controversial
one, that was something we would do again if faced with the same choices and it’s
something we would do in the future at any other track in similar circumstances.
That wasn’t a bad decision.
Of course when we then failed to execute that double stack correctly, everything falls apart
and it looks like a terrible mess, a sort of Keystone Cop moment where all of our normal
well-oiled machinery just falls apart and we start looking like clowns instead.
What caused that?
That was actually caused by one very simple thing and it’s a simple thing that could
have got us at any point in the last several years because that bug, that mistake in the
way we had set things up, has been sitting there as a gotcha waiting to get us and this
weekend I am afraid it did get us.
What was that?
I think you have to start by understanding that the radios that the pit crew use can
only hear one voice at a time.
Although they are listening to more than one potential input source, they can only hear
one input source at a time, not like a teleconference where you can have several people speaking
at once, one channel is all they can hear and they are normally listening to their boss
on the pit wall, Ron Meadows, who will tell them when they need to come out into the pit
lane in order to do a tyre stop.
But their radios are not just tuned in to Ron Meadows.
They are also tuned in or they are scanning to listen to the driver.
So, on George’s side of the garage his mechanics have their radios scanning, listening out
for the driver if the driver is going to pipe up and say something, their radios will latch
onto what the driver is saying and Valtteri’s side will do the same for Valtteri’s voice.
Right at the point where Ron was calling to the pit crew to do the double stack, exactly
at that moment, George was also speaking on the radio and for half of the people on George’s
side of the garage, their radios instead of hearing what Ron was saying the radio had
latched onto what George was saying instead.
So, half of the guys on George’s side of the garage did not hear the message and that
meant that when everyone came out into the pitlane to execute the stops, only half of
George’s tyres arrived and that meant that when George actually showed up in the pitlane
to get his stop done, the tyres that were sitting there were half his and half Valtteri’s
because the full set of Valtteri’s tyres did arrive.
And without realising it, that first stop, the mechanics fitted a mixed set, they fitted
to the car half of the set of George’s tyres correctly, and then they fitted what was there
which was Valtteri’s tyres.
So, at that point George left the pitlane with a mixed set of tyres.
Valtteri immediately behind pulled into the pit box, by then we realised we had screwed
up, couldn’t do anything at that stage about George, that problem was sailed.
However there was a moment where we realised we had screwed up and all that Keystone Cop
moment that you saw, that was the team scrambling around actually very effectively, to try and
undo the mess that we had created with that one mistake of having the radios programmed
in this way that caused the confusion to start with.
So, it caused a lot of lost time as we then scrambled the tyres around to get a valid
set onto Valtteri’s car, remembering of course that half of Valtteri’s tyres had
left with George, so we had to scramble a completely different set onto Valtteri’s
car and in fact the quickest and best way out was to actually refit the original tyres
that Valtteri had arrived with and then send him off on what weren’t good tyres for him
to be on but it was the best, or the least worst, option at that stage.
So, one tiny mistake, programming the radios in a way that they could override hearing
this really important call from Ronnie Meadows on the pit wall is what caused all that mess.
We are just lucky, of course, that this happened now, after a championship was settled, or
maybe not in next season when everything was live and really counting in the middle of
a championship fight.
But it was nevertheless very painful, very embarrassing and really, really hard rations
for both for George and for Valtteri to have to swallow the consequences of that when they
had driven so well up to that point.
Having had the tyre mix-up at the safety car stop and then having suffered a tyre change
to rectify that, to take the mixed set off and put his own correct tyres on the car,
having suffered all that George was still out there in the hunt for the win, he had
managed to get himself up into second place and was hounding down the Racing Point and
had a chance to overhaul it before the end of the race.
But at that point we noticed that he had picked up a puncture on his rear tyre.
It was a slow puncture thankfully and not one that destroyed the tyre and then the car
as you have seen so often in the past when these tyres let go.
But it did let us get back round to the pits and change the tyres.
What caused this slow puncture?
Well, we don’t know for sure, all we can tell you is that there was debris on the track
as a result of Aitken’s crash.
Maybe he picked up a small shard of carbon splinter from that incident and we also know
that in getting past all the people that he was overtaking, he was having to take some
fairly aggressive lines over kerbs in order to muscle his way by, and it is possible that
either from the debris of Aitken’s incident or from the kerb riding he was doing that
he picked up a cut that caused the puncture.
We don’t know for sure all we know is that the puncture happened, and that he took another
blow in what would have been a magnificent race for him to that point and that put pay
to his hopes of that maiden victory.
It was a shock when we learned seven days ago that Lewis had tested positive for COVID
and that that would deny him the opportunity to be in our car at the Sakhir Grand Prix.
It would deny him too his chance to exceed his own personal tally of number of wins in
a single season and perhaps to equal Michael’s record of 13, despite it only
being a 17-race season.
And we missed him all weekend.
But it is undeniable that we were also very excited about the prospect of seeing how George
would get on.
George has had a very impressive career in all the formulae that he has raced in so far
and none of us are in any doubt that he is a fast driver.
But the question was, actually how well would he stand up to the pressure, how would he
handle himself under the spotlight of the world when given the chance to run in a leading
car for the first time in Formula One?
And how would he stand up to that pressure when he was thrown right into the cauldron
of it with such short notice having to take onboard so much information in such a short
period of time?
I think we can say with absolute confidence that he answered that question in every respect
very, very strongly.
He set himself off in free practice gently but quickly worked himself up to a good pace.
Although Valtteri was just a shade quicker than him throughout the weekend and crucially
in qualifying what we saw in George was that as the pressure came on, he didn’t wilt
and actually through every session he improved.
And for someone, the very first time in the car, up against a pedeller who is as quick
as Valtteri, he showed a very, very good performance and I think that is the main takeaway for
us, is that question of how he would comport himself has been answered very, very strongly.
In the pressure of qualifying, he was absolutely on the money, on the race start he did a fantastic
job, in the race itself when he was called upon to overtake in an incisive manner, he
did so brilliantly.
These are all really, really important assets for a frontrunning driver and I think George,
despite the disappointment of the result, can go home knowing that he showed the world
what he is made of.
Thank you very much for all your questions and we will be back after the Abu Dhabi Grand
Prix to answer some more.