Limited running means “we don’t know if it’s a one or two-stop race”

Formula 1 teams are heading into today’s Portuguese Grand Prix with much less information than usual about what strategies to use because of their limited running on the unfamiliar and recently resurfaced Algarve circuit.

The track surface was re-laid last month. It offered little grip at the beginning of the weekend, but has improved as rubber has been laid on the racing line. However the second practice session, where teams typically conduct their long runs to assess tyre life, was disrupted by two red flags due to incidents.

AlphaTauri’s chief race engineer Jonathan Eddolls said they will have to “go into the race with more of an open mind” due to the limited information about tyre performance.

“We haven’t got good long-run data, so we don’t know what the tyre life is. We don’t know if it’s a one-stop or two-stop race because of the unknowns over the tyre life.”

Teams will study the performance of their rivals running different tyre compounds in the early stages to gauge how the rubber is performing in race conditions.

“We would go in with multiple plans and we would aim to be flexible. Not everyone will probably start on the same tyre. So we would try to analyse what everybody is doing in the first few laps, look at the degradation, look to see how the tyres are performing on the different teams and then update our strategy models and our plan live.

“So for us tomorrow the first 10 laps from the pit wall and operations room side are going to be the busiest because that’s really going to define then what we do for the rest of the race.”

Teams will prepare for a range of different scenarios which could unfold depending on how the tyres perform this afternoon.

“Although we can’t be certain how the strategy is going to pan out we’ll do lots of sensitivity studies,” says Eddolls. “So, for example, if the option tyre’s got 20 laps of life or if it’s got 40 laps of life, how does that impact the strategy?

“We try to replay as many of the situations [overnight] and review again [in the] morning so that when we go into the race, it’s not a surprise if the tyres behave in a different way – we’ve already been through a race scenario where that’s happened. Because obviously, if it ends up being a surprise at the time, then it’s very hard to to react, you’re on the back foot straightaway.

“So we try to do as much of the work up front tonight and there’s obviously more to do here because of more unknowns. But we will head into the race with with an open mind and an idea of the sensitivities and aim to try to do something a little bit different and score some points.”

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2020 Portuguese Grand Prix

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