It was really just telling us
the car was too much on the nose, too much on a knife-edge, too hard to handle… Hi, I'm Miles and I'm here with James to answer
your questions about the Dutch Grand Prix. James, first race back after the
shutdown. How's your time off? Well, it feels like a million years ago now, but
it was heavenly. I think all of us look forward to the shutdown. We're tired beforehand. And also
the nature of the shutdown rules means that it is a very blissful pair of weeks because they
are guilt-free holiday. You know that the inbox isn't filling. You know the jobs
aren't sort of building up for when you get back. It's just a brilliant two weeks. We
can spend it with family, do jobs you weren't otherwise going to do, just have fun and
not feel bad about it. So it was great. Let's get stuck in. From FP1 to the race itself,
the weather in Zandvoort seemed tricky. How much impact did the wind have on the car and indeed
the job of setting up the car during the weekend? When you're setting a car up, you arrive with
something that's not a million miles off normally and you're trying to find small steps, subtle
changes to just make it a little bit happier on the track. And the nirvana would be completely
consistent conditions. So you're seeing the effect of what you're doing. When the wind is
howling a gale and the rain's coming down and the track is dry sometimes and wet others, it's
hellishly hard to actually figure out what you're doing and what the outside world is doing to you.
So yeah, it really does complicate things a lot. Now before the summer shutdown, we could say
we really started to find the true pace of the W15. Our fans on YouTube want to know,
where do you think the pace of the past few races has gone? Or is it just the case
that it wasn't a good track for our car? It won't be as simple as, oh, the track doesn't
suit the car. Whether or not you have a good weekend is dependent on a huge number of things.
And all of them have to be pretty much near dead on right to get what you call the true pace of
the car out. And in the run up to the shutdown, we managed to hit our stride pretty much at every
track. We sort of went a little bit off the rails in Spa, but managed to pull it back just in time.
This weekend in Zandvoort, with the weather the way it was on the Friday and the decisions we
took overnight, we just didn't manage to get the groove that we needed to, to get the best
from the car. And small mistakes, small errors in setup will turn you from being really quite
competitive into quite mediocre. It's tight at the top. And we didn't get it right this weekend
and had a mediocre result as a consequence. Obviously, as you know, there's been a lot
of discussion about the new floor. How do we feel it performed during this weekend?
Simple answer is, we don't fully know. You can take some straightforward measurements
and say that the downforce it was supposed to deliver looked like it was there. So at one
level, you could take comfort that it worked as expected. But a lot of the pace of the cars
in this year, particularly, is down to how well they handle. So it's not just a question of
‘does your aero package deliver you downforce’, but is it delivering you the balanced car that
you need through the corners? Is it delivering you the balanced car you need from high speed to
low speed? And we definitely know that we didn't have a well-balanced car this weekend. That's
where most of our pace went. Whether that was the new floor, the new aero package or not, we need
to keep an open mind and something we will need to revisit in future races. So right now, we know it
measured the downforce, but we're not certain that it delivered good balance. Something we need
to investigate as we go on through the year. A question from LinkedIn. What happened with
Lewis in quali? It seemed like in the race he had a real chance of fighting for a podium.
Yeah, and look at him in Q1. Glorious lap in Q1 and then knocked out in Q2. A surprise to him,
a surprise to all of us. But I think what you're seeing there is that thing I was talking about
with the car's balance. We, for whatever reason, managed to produce a car this weekend that was
too on a knife edge. It was too ready to snap at the rear, for the rear to lose grip and
contact with the road when the drivers are trying to hustle it. And qualifying is when
they need to lean on the car and we could get a really good lap if they just managed to keep
this very pointy car sort of on rails. But just the tiniest slip of the rear caused by a gust,
caused by whatever, and then the rear tyres will light up. The temperature of the surface of the
rubber goes up dramatically just with one tiny little slip. As soon as that surface temperature
is up, it doesn't recover for several corners. The corners come at you thick and fast in Zandvoort
and there's not really any long straights for them to cool down on. And so one snap, that's
your lap gone. And that's what happened with Lewis. That's what happened to George in Q1 when
Lewis was the fastest car. George then did an OK lap in Q2 and Lewis got knocked out. It was really
just telling us the car was too much on the nose, too much on a knife edge, too hard to
handle. And that was something we paid a price for in quali and we paid a price for
later on in the weekend in the race as well. In terms of tyre choice, our fans from Weibo want
to know if the Soft/Medium/Soft would have been a better choice for Lewis than the Soft/Hard/Soft?
Possibly, although the Hard looked like an OK tyre, probably the best tyre that race. And the
real question is, would a one-stop have been better than a two-stop? And if you're going to
do a one-stop, then starting where Lewis started, Soft was an OK choice for the first stint because
we managed to make a few places there. And then it's Hard to the finish. That was the strategic
choice. And Hard was definitely the right tyre to pick to go from there to the end of the race.
However, we had to abandon that strategy to go to Soft/Hard/Soft because Lewis had a lock-up
which then damaged the tyre, which then took away the pace of the car. And then we're on a
recovery strategy at that point, having to make it into a two-stop. And Soft was our best option
for completing the race. But Soft/Hard/Soft, Soft/Medium/Soft, neither is competitive compared
with Soft/Hard, which was our intended strategy. And the second stop was only really a function of
trying to recover from that lock-up, because the pace he had on the Hard tyre prior to the lock-up
was very competitive. Once he got himself free of all those back markers, the car was running
quite well and he would have been doing good. Lap 54, we put George on a set of used
Softs. Our fans from Instagram want to know, what was the thinking behind George's second
stop? And could he have secured P6 without it? With the benefit of hindsight, yes. He could have
come home ahead of Perez if we had not made that second stop. At the time we took that decision,
Perez was still going reasonably strong. Sainz, who I think was in front of him, more strongly
still. And we were reasonably convinced both those cars were going to drive past us on
the road. They would have had the sort of delta in performance sufficient to overtake us on the
track. At the time we made that decision as well, our prediction of how long our tyres were
going to last was telling us they were going to run out of beans around about lap 65, 66.
And therefore, the car was just going to be really crawling around at the end. And we had the
opportunity to pre-emptively stop, put him on the Soft. And if the car ran strongly on that Soft,
then we had a hypothetical chance of then climbing back up, attacking Perez with the pace of newer
tyres, and maybe even having a go at Sainz. So instead of surrendering the two places we thought
were certainly lost, maybe a chance to get them back. In the end, that was overly optimistic. We
didn't have the pace to come back and get those two places we voluntarily surrendered. And in
retrospect, we wish we had just stayed out on the track and taken our chances. Almost certainly
would have lost to Sainz, but we probably would have held our own against Perez, who had his
own tyre issues, we learned a few laps later. This year, Monza is undergoing a few changes,
including a complete resurfacing of the track. What are our expectations for Monza?
Well, hopefully a resumption of the sort of pace we had running up to the summer break
rather than the rather disappointing Zandvoort we just experienced. It's going to be an interesting
weekend though. Monza has just been resurfaced, so new tarmac throughout and with Pirelli electing to
bring the softest of the rubber to that track. New tarmac is very grippy, but it also brings with it
the risk of graining. That's when the tyre sticks to the road and tears, physically tears itself
to bits if it turns out that the stress is too high in the tyre. So that'll be a thing to look
out for. I think that we ought to be able to get the car dialled in alright on the setup. We'll go
and figure out for sure whether that aero upgrade that we bought to Zandvoort was hampering us or
helping us. And with a bit of luck, just a smooth weekend competing, I hope, for a podium or better.
But we'll see what happens when we get there.