The Belgian Blog: Saturday

Posted on Sunday 29 Aug 2010 and tagged with belgium, spa, blog.

With FP3 not starting until 11am, we had a slightly later start this morning. We left the hotel at 0715 and my first job at the track, like yesterday, was to check the fuel temperature so that we could start warming the engines. We then fired them up to make sure they were okay.

At 0900 we had our first meeting of the day to discuss strategy. That was harder than it sounds because we have no idea what the weather is going to do in tomorrow’s race! All we could do is plan for a dry race and then work out the cross-over points for intermediate tyres and full wets.

I’ll be very surprised if there isn’t rain at some point in the race, so we’ve prepared for that eventuality. The long lap at Spa means there’s a lot to be won and lost in a single strategy call. Rain can be very localised; it can be raining at one corner and dry at another, so we’re going to be reliant on driver input to help us make the right decisions.

We experienced come classic Spa weather in qualifying today. In Q1 it rained at Stavelot, but the track was dry everywhere else and that made it very difficult for the drivers and the teams. Nico was teetering on the edge at one point and he did a solid lap at the right time to progress into the next segment of qualifying.

Q2 was reasonably straightforward for the drivers because it was dry throughout and they both drove well. I’d say seventh and ninth exceeded our expectations and Rubens did a great job to find 0.4s over Nico in the middle sector of his final lap. He was on the prime tyre, whereas Nico was using a set of used options. That wasn’t ideal for Nico, but it left him with a good tyre strategy if it’s a dry race (you never know!).

With the parc fermé regulations, we couldn’t make any changes to the set-up of the cars post-qualifying. That left us with lots of time to analyse the data and think through more strategies. There’s no limit to the amount of work you can do in F1!