China 2011 - GP Preview - Toro Rosso Ferrari

You can tell which members of the F1 circus have not been back to Europe since they set off a week before the Australian Grand Prix. To start with, they are usually suntanned, but there is also a worrying faraway look in their eyes, indicating they have had one too many hotel breakfasts and seen the world only through the eyes of a CNN news bulletin.

For them, the long trip is now nearly over as we tackle a relatively short flight from Kuala Lumpur to Shanghai. We’ve been coming to SIC (Shanghai International Circuit) since 2004, but even so, every year, the first time you walk into the paddock, the sheer size of the place still takes your breath away. It’s utterly pointless of course, because even if you doubled the number of cars on the grid, you wouldn’t need anything this big, but the fastest growing nation on earth wanted to show what it could do and it certainly proved its point. It is, to the naked eye way way bigger than anything else on the calendar.

The actual track is also massively wide, with a very long straight, but how naïve were the pundits who felt this would make for cars attempting different lines through the corners and passing down the straight? Just to be clear on this, a Formula 1 car off the racing line is about as agile and graceful as an Elephant on roller skates, so actually, passing another car here has always been difficult. However, this year with the DRS, that might not be the case on the straight.

Last year’s race was run in a chilly rain and although the original forecast for this week indicated cold weather, that seems to be changing so it could actually be another warm weekend, although obviously not on a par with Sepang. Track temperature could have a significant effect on the outcome of the race, as our technical director, Laurent Mekies explains: “What we can see from the first two races is that tyre management is going to be the key to the weekend. We have had the same compounds at the first two races and the same again for China and Turkey. There was a very big change in how the tyres behaved in Melbourne and Sepang and again we can expect that the big difference in track temperature when we get to China will mean that the ability to make the car work with these tyres and get them operating in their optimum range will again be the key to the weekend.”

Even with just a few days between these races, we are hoping to have a couple of minor updates for the STR6 in Shanghai. “With the big regulation changes introduced this year and with it being so tight between Williams, Force India and ourselves in the midfield the slightest improvement you manage to bring to the car, even when the races are only one week apart, are bound to make a difference,” reckons Mekies. “Hopefully the few small updates we plan to bring to Shanghai will help us to make a step forward.”