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Your briefing for the French Grand Prix

Your briefing for the French Grand Prix

Got your pass? Check. McLaren kit? Check. Okay, good, now switch off your phone and follow us through the glass doors and into the Paddock Performance Centre. Grab a coffee on your way in, and we’ll get started with our engineering briefing for the French Grand Prix.

Returning to a regular race weekend format for the French Grand Prix, after the Sprint round in Austria, gives us an additional practice session to maximise, and we'll be looking to do just that. We've brought an update to Le Castellet, and Paul Ricard's reputation as a testing track makes this an ideal venue to try it out, we just need your expertise to help us run the rule over it.

Will Joseph is leading this weekend’s briefing, and there’s plenty on the agenda. Take notes if you need them, but please keep them to yourself.

Engineer: Will Joseph Event: French Grand Prix Circuit: Circuit Paul Ricard

As part of our development plan this season, we have brought an upgrade to France, which we will be studying in practice. The bodywork and sidepods are noticeably different, and there is also a new floor. It’s following in the direction we’ve been heading this season – but more so.

We wanted to compare performance versus the old car, so Daniel ran the upgraded car in FP1, whilst Lando provided the baseline in the 'old' car. Lando will now switch to the upgraded car for FP2.

At the same time as studying the new package, we’ll be doing all of the usual tests with set-up in the background.

It is a little bit boring this year – because everyone is doing the same thing at every track! The practice experiments are based around seeing how stiff and how low at the rear you can run a 2022 car on each new circuit we encounter.

The aim will be to see how low you can run the rear ride-height without either damaging the car or getting the dreaded porpoising, and then trying to understand how the plank wears. We’re getting better at putting the car in the right place, which means more confidence that we will not damage the floor.

In the practice sessions, the aim is to understand the track, explore various lines and find out where the limits are, ensure we’re running the rear as low as practical, work out where the stiffnesses are appropriate, and learn all we can before putting the cars into their final spec on Saturday.

Downforce levels are an interesting conundrum at Paul Ricard because there are definitely two different ways of looking at it. According to the data, there isn’t a great deal to choose between running with the medium downforce rear wing and the low downforce version, and whenever the difference is minor, the choice becomes interesting.

On paper, the medium-downforce set-up might be favoured, but Paul Ricard has long straights, and being competitive on end-of-straight speed is important, which favours going with the lower-downforce wing.

As always, with this conundrum, we’ll monitor it as we go along. We started with the low-downforce set-up and will assess it as we learn more about the new package and see where our car is relative to our competitors.

Learning about tyres is a large part of practice at any circuit, but it’s particularly interesting here because, in previous years, Paul Ricard has been on the cusp between one and two stops. Last year, we made a one-stop race work very well – but at the front of the field, other drivers struggled with that and thought two stops was better.

It is a tough circuit for tyres, and the front-left, in particular, will take a beating. Any corner that puts it under a great deal of strain will be a concern – but Turn 11 is the obvious one because it just goes on and on. We’ll have to look at these very carefully.

The final thing to note about practice in Paul Ricard is that we expect it to be hot. Perhaps very hot. We’ll want to assess what that does to the track, and what that track does to the tyres. If temperatures are extreme, you’ll see cars being run with very open bodywork to gain a cooling benefit.

Different teams do that in different ways. Some open up the rear exits of the bodywork, others open up the shoulder louvres [the ‘gills’ on top of the sidepods]. Our upgraded car is more louvre-oriented than its predecessor, so that’ll be interesting to study.

The other temperature-affected area of study is downforce levels. If it’s incredibly hot, and the tyres are struggling in the heat, you might be tempted to run a little more downforce than usual to help with tyre cooling by making the car slide a little less… but this is one we’ll understand more when the cars are out there and getting on with it.

Briefing complete. Time for Lando and Daniel to head out onto the track so we can collect some data and put our hard work to the test.

How much do you know about our history at the French Grand Prix?

"It's important we continue to build on our results this season as the midfield gets tighter"

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