Formula 1 testing is fast approaching as the 10 teams and their respective drivers head to the Bahrain International Circuit for three days of pre-season. Before the action begins, former Aston Martin strategist Bernie Collins is here to give details of the proceedings, explaining how the peloton will approach the week and highlighting what to watch out for…
What are the drivers’ and teams’ priorities?
At many times in F1, the priorities of the driver and the teams are different. During races, the driver often only focuses on his own championship points or finishing position rather than that of his teammate, for example. Testing is no different.
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The driver’s only focus is that this car is going to win races and be predictable to drive. They usually focus on fuel efficient and softer tires. Meanwhile, a team’s priority for testing can be roughly divided into two sections: reliability and performance.
First of all, is the car reliable? Last year we saw both Red Bull cars retire in the opening race in Bahrain due to mechanical failure. Every championship point counts, so they and others will want to avoid that kind of open goal in the championship fight.
Bahrain will hold three days of pre-season testing and the opening round of the 2023 F1 season
Reliability testing takes many forms. There are controls for the cooling of the car: for example, an undercooled PSU may fail or run with poor performance, while an overcooled PU wastes the airflow supplied to the car, which could otherwise be used to provide downforce or reduce drag.
All underbody mechanical systems, from the suspension to the drivers’ drink systems, are tested in a variety of situations. Do the almost standard fuel starvation test which verifies that all fuel pumps are able to collect every bit of fuel from the tank during a low fuel qualifying lap. This is often the cause of many red flags at the end of test sessions.
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Performance is more complicated. With only three days of testing ahead of the 2023 season and limited racing and tire availability, it will be impossible to accommodate testing requests from every department, even if all goes well.
In addition, only certain tests can be completed together so as not to influence the results of another. As a simple example, the car should ideally be run at different ride heights to access tuning performance, but between races differences in track improvement, temperature, wind and tire condition will affect the results without any further testing, let alone learning the driver.
Teams end the three days with a huge volume of data that must be isolated from various test conditions to achieve the desired test result.
Collins started his F1 career with McLaren, before joining Force India (now Aston Martin)
The most obvious tools we see teams using in testing are aero rakes. These devices are simply tiny tubes attached to various places on the car to monitor the airflow in that region. They allow teams to check the results of the wind tunnel or CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) against reality.
The car will be driven in given setup conditions to get the most accurate results. This aero mapping is important because finding and understanding any errors in the wind tunnel or CFD modeling will avoid wasting factory design time on a component that doesn’t work on the track. Similarly, teams use flow-vis – a type of paint that flows – to visualize how air flows over a component like a rear wing.
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The car will be loaded with additional sensors that cannot be seen on TV. Thermocouples will be used to monitor the temperatures of various components to ensure that nothing is overheating or cooling too much. When thermocouples cannot be used, teams can use temperature stickers. These stickers give a temperature region reached by a component.
Additional video cameras or thermal cameras can be added to collect images or video not normally available to teams to show complex tire surface temperatures or how aerodynamic components move during the race .
All of these sensors come with additional cables or data collection devices that change the weight and configuration of the car. A compromise is therefore needed between data collection and driving the car, as will be the case for the opening practice on the Friday of the Bahrain race weekend.
Flow-vis paint is a common sight in testing as teams try to learn as much as possible about their new cars
Can we learn anything from lap times?
Much is often made of the best times achieved by each driver or team during the tests. However, in reality, the image is blurry. Fastest lap times are affected by fuel load, tire composition, car mass, engine mode and time of day.
A car loaded with sensors could be significantly overweight: every 10 kg could be worth 0.3 seconds of lap time. As the track condition improves each day, lap times will improve even without any other changes.
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The track temperature will also significantly increase or decrease the achievable lap time, not to mention changing wind levels and any deposition of desert sand. Therefore, it is difficult to differentiate fuel load, car mass, and engine mode from outside observation alone.
The most representative racing during winter testing has traditionally been full race simulations. It’s a time of day when teams complete the 57 laps the Bahrain race requires on three or four sets of tires with live pit stops.
This eliminates the fuel load variable, as the number of laps completed dictates the starting fuel level. The engine mode and total car weight variables remain, but it’s often a good indication of the team’s race pace, which is ultimately where the points are earned.
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The strategy departments will aim to correct these runs based on the time of day and improve the tracks to predict the expected team pace in the first race. However, with just three days of testing, many teams may drop a time-consuming race simulation, so race pace may not show its hand until Bahrain Sunday.
What role can fuel loads and tire compounds play?
This year, Pirelli is introducing a new tire compound, which will be used at the Bahrain race weekend. Besides the pure performance of the car, tire and strategy engineers will be keen to get a first look at the difference in pace and levels of degradation between these compounds. This will help in developing Friday race plans not only for Bahrain, but also for events that feature looser compound lineups.
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Other than that, in testing, harder tires provide the most consistent runs, with little change in tire performance lap after lap, while still allowing for further testing – while softer compounds provide the fastest lap times and fastest warm-up for races that require it.
The effect of fuel load can easily be calculated by a team, so by running the car at 50kg rather than the true level of qualification, it is easy to determine how fast the car may be capable. Teams, however, will be keen to explore car balance or performance limits at either end of the scale.
The behavior of a car with 110 kg of fuel on board with the DRS (the drag reduction system) deactivated can be very different from 5 kg in the tank with the DRS activated. This has been demonstrated in 2022, with porpoising increasingly becoming an issue in states without DRS.
Tire compounds and fuel loads are crucial things to consider
Can teams play games to enhance – or mask – their true pace?
There are many tricks to hide the rhythm of the car. The key for a team is to only perform useful tests for information gathering and not to corrupt your own data. It is dangerous for a team to be too focused during testing on the information the competition is getting rather than the information you need.
Some teams won’t use the softer compounds to avoid showing the fastest pace possible, but then they have less information when those compounds are first needed. Some teams will refuel during the race simulation, but miss the all-important pit stop practice.
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It is possible to test tires with different compounds, but in order to disguise the rhythm between each, change engine modes or tire pressures or temperatures. In the same way that cars can be overweight due to the extra sensors, during practice cars can be underweight, appearing faster than they can legally reach during qualifying in Bahrain.
What is certain is that busy days are ahead for the drivers and their teams…
Find a host of other beginners’ guides and explainers ahead of the 2023 campaign – including a breakdown of the weekend format and how the schedule is put together – in our pre-season preview area.