The Belgian Blog: Friday

Posted on Friday 27 Aug 2010 and tagged with spa, belgium, blog.

John Russell is our Senior Systems Engineer and a Formula One veteran so who better to blog from Spa this weekend?

"It’s fantastic to be back at Spa-Francorchamps, a proper race circuit. With long straights in sectors 1 and 3, and a twisty middle sector, it’s an interesting technical challenge for the engineers. When you factor in the changeable weather conditions that we’re expecting, we have the ingredients for a fascinating race.

Friday is always the busiest day of a grand prix weekend for the engineers because it’s our main opportunity to work on the cars. We left our hotel in Liege at 0645 and as soon as we arrived at the track, where it was already raining hard, I set the fuel temperature and we started to warm up the cars.

At 0900 we had our first engineering meeting of the day. It was a continuation of yesterday afternoon’s briefing, in which we discussed the programme for today. We have several new parts to try here and the weather was clearly going to make it harder to assess the performance of the aerodynamic upgrades. However, some of the hardware steps – to the oil system and engine mapping – could be tested irrespective of track conditions.

The opening practice session went smoothly, although we didn’t do any serious running with Rubens until the latter stages because he wanted us to make some alterations to the steering rack on his car. There were no technical issues on either car.

In FP2 we expected the track to dry out, but it took ages for a dry line to appear and we only got a couple of dry laps right at the end of the session. That didn’t give us much information to work with, but it was the same for everyone.

At the end of the day’s running, we had to allocate our gear ratios for the remainder of the weekend. With such a mixed bag of weather in the pipeline, we had no choice other than to opt for dry weather ratios because you lose a lot more if you run wet ratios in the dry than dry ratios in the wet. It was a pretty simple decision. We’ll now look at the data to see what improvements can be made ahead of tomorrow morning’s final practice session.

Looking ahead, it’s difficult to predict the outcome of this grand prix. The weather could result in a mixed grid and we could see tyre wear issues in the race because the high-speed corners were killing the wet tyres today."