Hello, I’m James Allison and I’m here
to answer your questions about the Belgian Grand Prix.
Spa is an odd track from an engineering perspective
because in some ways it feels like Groundhog Day
Every time you go there every year, we end
up with the same debate each year.
Should we be fast in sectors one and three
on the straights or should we be fast in sector
two, where it’s a bit more twisty.
And what level of wing should we run in order to do that.
The answer is always the same irrespective
of the debate: you should choose the level
of wing where the lap time is the fastest.
And maybe, just, just, just go a little bit
lower on the wing to protect yourself on the
straights in the race.
It’s an easy question to ask, it’s an
easy question to answer but it doesn’t stop
us arguing about it endlessly every single
time we go to Spa – in every team I have
ever been in and probably will be forever more.
There’s one way to solve that, and that
would be to only take to Spa one particular
rear wing and then no one could talk about it.
But every year we take a couple of rear wing
options and then we have the debate.
But the answer is always the same, pick the
fastest one and stick with it.
The Safety Car actually had quite a big influence
on the Belgian Grand Prix this year.
The race should have been a fairly easy one-stop,
Medium and then Hard for the frontrunners,
where the Medium tyre was performing very
nicely and would likely have gone all the
way to mid-distance, leaving the second half
of the race on the Hards.
But when the Safety Car came out relatively
early on in the race, that gave everyone no
choice really but to dive into the pits, take
the new set of tyres, fit the Hards and then
see where things panned out from there.
Once we were running on those Hard tyres and
the degradation looked a little bit higher
than we were expecting, then the dilemma quickly
shifted to whether this was going to be a
one-stop race, whether we could do the rest
of the race on that Hard tyre, or whether
we should stop for a second time and put fresh
rubber on for the last third of the race.
In the end we stuck with the one-stop, with
our tyres not in the best shape at the end
of the race but nevertheless good enough to win.
You may have heard early-ish in the race,
Lewis say on the radio with a degree of urgency
in his voice, ‘loss of power’.
And that sounds quite dramatic.
For us, on the engineering side, it was fortunately
not a scary thing.
All it meant was that Lewis had spent that
lap discharging more energy than normal because
the lap required it from his ERS system.
So, gradually running the battery down through
the lap and you get to a point where you’ve
discharged so much energy, that you are no
longer allowed to discharge any more because
you have reached the limit per lap that the
regulations allow you to.
So, at that point, the ERS system will cut
off stone dead in the lap and Lewis will feel
the loss of power.
Now, at the time when he experiences that,
he doesn’t know whether it is just a straightforward
energy cut or whether he’s actually had
a mechanical failure.
So, he makes the call to just tell us he is
feeling something bad, and we’re able very,
very rapidly to reassure him ‘don’t worry,
it’s just the energy limit, it’ll come back'.
And then Lewis chills out, he knows he has
to drive a couple of laps charging it back
up and everything will be fine.
And, that’s what happened.
So, sounded dramatic, feels dramatic for Lewis
for a short while until we’re able to reassure
him, but just a normal thing that can happen
on Spa, which is a long lap, very easy to
use up your energy in that way.
After the race Valtteri talked a little bit
in public about the numbness he felt in his leg.
But, it’s actually something which we have
struggled with not just for Spa but for a
long time with Valtteri, which is getting
him fully, fully comfortable in the car.
And he’s had to endure seasons with us where
he feels that difficulty in his leg, caused
by the seat not being exactly to his liking
and where it just cuts off a bit of blood
flow and he gets a numb leg as a consequence.
It’s not sufficiently debilitating to actually
have a big impact on his performance, but
it is nevertheless something that we would
absolutely like to get right.
We have tried a number of variations of seat
and of pedal, but we have got more to do.
We want to get him so that he is utterly,
utterly comfortable under all conditions,
all tracks, all the way through the season
but we haven’t yet found that magic combination
and we will keep working until we do.
This weekend at Spa was probably the last
weekend ever where the drivers have all the
mode allocations available to them that the
PU has to offer.
From next weekend in Monza onwards, it will
be just one flat mode all the way through
the weekend.
But as we went into this weekend, the drivers
still had the full range of power available
to them and they had a limited number of overtake
presses each that they could apply during
the race and when they press that button for
the overtake, they get for a short period
the full might of the PU to go down the straight
with.
It is however a very limited resource, because
it does a lot of damage to the PU and therefore
something that we only get a very small number of.
So we need to make sure that we use that resource
in the best possible way for the team and
the best possible way of using it is to make
sure we are using it against our direct competitors,
against the people who we are fighting against
in the Championship, not against each other.
So, we didn’t want to use it in a fight
between Lewis and Valtteri but we did want
to make sure that we had that overtake button
available to us in the case of a Safety Car
restart, in the case of some bad luck meaning
that we were behind someone that we needed
to get in front of.
We’d had that agreement before the race
not to use it against each other but both
drivers knew that they were free to race one
another, just not using that last step of
PU performance.
The relatively early Safety Car in the Spa
Grand Prix meant that everybody had to do
a pretty long stint if they were going to
get the Hard tyres to go all the way to the
end of the race from the Safety Car incident.
And that was maybe a little bit like the first
Silverstone race, where similarly an early
Safety Car meant that the tyres had to go
a long stint and we saw those explosions at
the end that set everybody’s pulse racing.
Now, in Spa, we were nervous, but we weren’t
particularly nervous about that.
The nature of the circuit, the tyre pressures
we were running didn’t really give us any
concerns that the tyre itself would fail but
we were nevertheless worried for different reasons.
We were worried that we were simply going
to just use up the amount of tread on the
rubber and the tyre would then lose its performance,
to the point where we would be too slow to
get to the end of the race and keep our noses
in front.
So, that was our concern.
We just wanted to make sure that we husbanded
it to the end of the race with some rubber
remaining on the tyre and to look after the
tyre in the closing laps of the race, to make
sure that we stayed off kerbs and stuff that
might have done it any damage.
But we did all the way through that second
stint, continually assess whether or not we
would have been better to dive into the pits
and make it into a two-stop race.
But we figured that as long as we were ahead
of Verstappen by an amount that was sufficient,
to prevent him from undercutting us, that
we had the luxury of waiting for him to pull
the trigger on that so that we didn’t have
to gamble that actually maybe a one-stop would’ve
been the best result in the end.
So, we just sat there a comfortable gap ahead
of Verstappen waiting to see whether he blinked first.
And if he had come into the pits for a stop,
we would have followed him in a lap later,
and hopefully retained our lead.
Thank you very much for all of your questions.
We’ll be back next week to answer a whole
load more of them after the Italian Grand Prix.
