Hi, I am Andrew Shovlin and I will be answering your questions from the Russian Grand Prix
and we have recorded these debriefs in a few interesting places over the year.
Today we are a little bit closer to home because this is my home, but I will answer your
questions as best as I can.
So, this question is about the tyre at the very end of Qualifying 2.
We put Lewis on the Soft tyre after the red flag but to know why we did that you really
have to go back to the start of the session.
We wanted both cars to start the race on the Medium.
It was a better tyre, lower degradation and we were doing that on the first runs in Q2
with both of them.
Now, Lewis was on a very good lap, but he went wide at Turn 18 and that meant that his
lap time got deleted.
Now, not only does it mean that time gets deleted, it means the next lap, the one you
are starting, also gets deleted and we only had fuel for two timed laps.
So that was really the reason that he couldn’t have carried on that run.
I know he said: ‘Can’t I do another lap?’
Well, the reality was we didn’t have the fuel in the car to be able to do a third lap,
therefore there was no option but to bring the car in.
We then went to go on our second set of Medium tyres, our final set of new Medium tyres.
Lewis was on another very quick lap.
It would have easily put him through but unfortunately, we got that red flag with Vettel just as Lewis
was coming into the penultimate corner.
So, despite the fact that this was another quick lap that didn’t count.
When there was that red flag they stopped the clock and there was two minutes and 15 remaining.
So, that’s just enough time to do an out lap and at this point we’ve got no new Medium
tyres left.
Really, the only sensible decision was to put a Soft tyre on it because we would much
rather be at the front on a Soft tyre than P11 having been bumped out of Qualifying 2
on a Medium tyre.
We knew it was going to be busy, we knew that we were going to have to jostle for position
on the out lap, maybe even pass some traffic on the fast lap.
So, we were quite confident that actually although it wasn’t our plan A going into
the session taking the Soft tyre at that stage was the right thing to do.
So, this was clearly a huge factor in Lewis’s race.
On the reconnaissance laps the drivers can do practice starts and, on this event, it
said you could do them after the pit exit on the right-hand side.
Now, Lewis had said could he go a bit further.
This was about trying to get the car off the rubber where everyone’s being practising
starts all weekend, that is often grippier than the grid itself, so it’s not the perfect
location to do it and from an engineering point of view, we often ask the drivers to
move a bit further down.
Now, when Lewis asked if he could go further down we said that was fine.
We hadn’t realised he would go quite as far as he did and that was really where the
misunderstanding was.
We thought he meant a few metres; he was actually asking if he could go a bit further and we
should have given him a different answer to that question.
You’d have heard during the race when we were getting ready for that pit stop for Lewis
he was asking if he could go further.
He was saying the tyres were fine.
Well, actually the first time that he did that we let him stay out because he had good
pace, he was able to use a bit more of the grip of the rubber that is doing more damage
but he found quite a lot of lap time and he was able to actually build a bit of a gap.
Now, the problem is it is very soft rubber, it has very high wear rates and we can see
the tyre wearing just from the temperatures that we are measuring onboard the car.
We knew that it was getting quite close to the end of life.
Now, when it starts to drop it drops very quickly and suddenly you get a lot of degradation
and there are a few problems if we had stayed out into that phase and that is what we were
worried about.
One is that for Lewis’s race, well there are other cars that are in there and bear
in mind that he has got this ten second penalty.
You’ve actually to look quite a long way back to see who you are racing when you drop
out after that pit stop.
One of the Renaults had already stopped, they would have been closing that gap up on him
and it was really a question for him of, don’t stay out when the tyres start to lose a lot
of grip because you will just end up with more cars to overtake later.
Now, the other fact was actually about Valtteri’s race.
If Lewis starts to drop off, he’ll lose pace, Valtteri will back into Lewis but more
importantly Verstappen starts to move into undercut range.
And we always want to protect the win for the team and at that point not only would
it have hurt Lewis’s race if we had left him out, it would have started to compromise
Valtteri’s race and would have given Verstappen an opportunity to take the lead and principally
that’s why we did it.
But when we got the tyre wear post-race, we could see that there was actually less than
half a millimetre of rubber left on that tyre.
So, it’s really worn by that stage and in reality, while it might have done maybe one
more lap, you certainly wouldn’t have done three or four laps on that tyre.
The strategy options for Lewis were actually quite limited but it wasn’t so much how
the penalty affected the strategy itself, it was just that starting on the Soft tyre
means you have to come in earlier, therefore you have got to do a long stint on the Hard tyre.
He did a good job of managing it to the end of the race, you have to do a bit of management
otherwise you would have run out of rubber but in reality our car isn’t so quick against
the Red Bull that we can expect to chase them down when we are on older rubber and try to
make an overtake.
So, unfortunately the issues with starting on the Soft but certainly coupled with that
penalty meant that third place was the best that Lewis could achieve on the day.
As you saw, that gap from Valtteri to Max did shrink as Valtteri was hitting that backmarker traffic.
Now, when you are the race leader you hit it first, everyone loses a bit of time in
traffic, so you do get that effect.
But then, you know that the gap will grow again when Max has to pass through the same cars.
Now, also Valtteri got himself into a really commanding position in this race.
He had driven well, he was looking after his tyres and when you get into these final stages
you are coming up against backmarkers who are racing each other pretty hard.
You saw a lot of those cars were trying passing moves on each other, changing position and
when you are the race leader coming through you want to make sure that they have seen
you, before you sort of try and go down the inside.
You don’t want them closing the door on you.
So, he was being pretty careful, but he put a lot of effort into getting himself into
this position.
He was leading the race, you are coming into the final few laps and more than anything
the driver is just making sure that they don’t make any mistakes, they make sure that other
cars have seen them and you just try to get the thing to the finish.
Valtteri didn’t have his normal Race Engineer
at the track this weekend, that is normally Riccardo.
Now, Riccardo is expecting a child any day soon so he was staying back at base following
things from the Race Support Room, providing support in that way but stepping into his
shoes we had Dom, who normally runs our Race Support Room, out at the track engineering
a car in a race weekend for the first time.
But he did a splendid job, we were very pleased with it, and it was great to be able to have
Dom celebrating that win with Valtteri on the podium.
Now, this one is not so much on the topic of the Russian Grand Prix but is it cereal
and then milk or milk and then cereal?
Well, personally I don’t think I have ever in my life done the milk and then the cereal
into the milk because that just isn’t right and it’s probably as wrong as people who
make a cup of tea where they put the milk in the cup and then the bag and then the hot
water and stir it.
Now, the benefit of that is you can get the colour about right, but it is back to front
so I would have thought that is quite an easy one.
For me it is Weetabix.
The Weetabix go in and then the milk and that’s how you can get the level just right.
You obviously want the Weetabix just protruding a few millimetres at the top and then as it
absorbs it you will see the level drop a little bit as it is starting to go into the Weetabix
but I really don’t see what you would achieve if you did it the other way round.
Thank you for all of your questions.
We are going to be back in two weeks’ time after the Eifel Grand Prix to answer some more.