Renault F1: A typical Friday at the track

Friday at a Grand Prix is always a hectic time, even though the end-of-day press release usually just talks about a ‘normal Friday’. There’s a massive amount of work to shoehorn into just three hours of track time. Tyre compounds need evaluating, data needs collecting, and the drivers must find a good set-up direction for the rest of the weekend. But what exactly does it all involve?

To tackle these tasks, both Robert and Vitaly usually work together and pool their data to ensure the team gets through the workload. Of course, there are some things that both drivers need to assess, such as the feel for tyres, but it’s not necessary to repeat everything with each car.

On Friday, the cars run with varying fuel loads across the sessions, usually starting with low fuel runs to allow the drivers to assess set-up changes and get an understanding for the car. The high fuel runs will be used to assess tyre degradation, brake wear and race pace, and will help the engineers plan the race strategy. In this way, the team works with both qualifying and the race in mind.

As well as dialling the car into the track, Friday represents the only real chance to test and validate new upgrades. For example, the team developed some new gearbox parts recently and ran them on the car on three different Fridays before finally racing them. Of course, the main development item in Spa will be the validation of the f-duct to see if its performance matches the factory simulations.

Perhaps the main challenge facing the team on the first day of practice is evaluating the tyres compounds, especially because the allocation is so restricted. In FP1 just one set of prime tyres are available, which can only be used in this session, while for FP2 there are just one set of primes and one set of options. Each driver never has more than one set of each compound available during either of the Friday sessions, which means fresh rubber is always in short supply.

In terms of tyres for this weekend, Bridgestone has supplied the hard and soft compounds because Spa’s high-speed corners always produce high degradation rates. And it’s not uncommon to have low ambient and track temperatures at Spa, which could make it difficult to get heat into the tyres and get them working at their best.

The Friday set-up programme for Spa is likely to see quite a bit of experimentation with aero levels. Both the first and final sectors are dominated by straights where top speed is important, while the middle sector requires downforce to cope with the high-speed corners such as Pouhon. The team will therefore experiment to see which direction brings the biggest gains in lap time.

And what about the greatest corner of them all? These days Eau Rouge is no longer the challenge it once was, simply because the cars have so much grip available. That’s not to say it shouldn’t be treated with respect on Friday morning, but it won’t take long before the cars are taking it flat.

At the end of the Friday sessions there’s still plenty of work to be done. The team can change anything on the cars overnight and it’s not uncommon to see the mechanics burning the midnight oil as they strip and rebuild the cars. The occasional all-nighter isn’t out of the question either. The usual routine involves a change of engines and gearboxes to fit the race units, as well as replacing radiators and some suspension components. And of course, it’s the time to make those important set-up changes that are needed for Saturday morning.

The final Friday challenge is trying to interpret the timesheets and gauge competitiveness. It’s certainly not an easy task, with lap times on low and high fuel loads varying by as much as four seconds, but the engineers usually have a fair idea of the pecking order by the end of the day. By looking at the short and long run pace of others, an assessment can be made of overall competitiveness