Toro Rosso race engineer Andrea Landi gives us his opinions on the most strategically minded and technical F1 season in recent memory.
As F1 adapts to Pirelli tyres with very different characteristics to the Bridgestones they replace, so the issue of when to stop and how many stops to make has become crucial in battle for world championship points.
It’s also thrown one aspect of the role played by race engineers into sharp relief. Sitting on the pitwall, but speaking directly into the ear of their driver, the race engineers shoulder a lot of responsibility for how strategy plays out – but the job involves a lot more than that. We spoke to Andrea Landi, race engineer for Jaime Alguersuari.
RB: So Andrea, can you explain the permutations you and the team have to consider when deciding on a pitstop strategy?
AL: Well, it’s definitely not easy this year – and if you wait too long to figure out what you should be doing, then you’ve probably already lost places.
This year we have to anticipate tyre behaviour, and estimate what those tyres will be doing at the end of a stint. Basically we have to work out when the degradation will become too great for the driver to remain competitive, and plan to stop before that point. That’s always been the case but this year the challenge has changed.
In general we are seeing a much higher fall-off in performance from the beginning to the end of the stint, so when you stop to fit new tyres, the delta – in terms of lap time gain – is much bigger. If you stop two or three laps earlier than your direct competitors, maybe you can gain 10 seconds – but maybe that also risks having to make one extra stop. It’s an interesting calculation to make.
Jaime says he doesn’t understand the tyres as much as he would like. What is there for him to understand?
The tyres have a memory. You have to manage them very carefully at the beginning of a stint to optimise their performance over the whole stint. If you start using 100 per cent of their capability at the beginning of the stint, with the heaviest fuel load, then those tyres will be stressed for the rest of their life, and that lifetime will be shorter. You really have to manage your pace at the beginning of the stint to avoid that.
This is something the driver has to learn. From the engineering perspective, it’s difficult to communicate, because you are not a driver. You have hundreds, thousands of sensors on the car to look all sorts of parameters, but ultimately it’s the driver who is sitting in the car and has the real feeling for it. He has to make a judgement on how fast he can go without harming his tyres, which is a difficult thing to do. This year it probably calls for him to drive at 95 per cent of the car’s capability, rather than 100 per cent, and have faith in the idea that he will get a gain from that later.
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Jaime says being told to drive slower than he can is a form of torture for an F1 driver. Is it tougher to rein in the youngest guy on the grid than it would be with a more experienced driver?
Looking at it logically, the advantage of an older driver is always going to be their level of know-how. Racing is no different to any other job: experience isn’t something that can be taught, it’s always going to only come with time and you just have to accept a younger driver is handicapped a little by a lack of experience. On the other hand, the older driver is going to want to do the same things the same way he’s been doing them for 15 years and it’s going to be very difficult to change him – and maybe that’s a bigger problem than inexperience.
For myself I take pleasure in working with a young driver like Jaime because he’s very open-minded and keen to learn. It’s also an opportunity to build something together as a driver and a team of engineers – and I enjoy that too.
This year’s Toro Rosso STR6 packs a lot of technology into a very small space. Does that make it difficult to work on in the confines of a garage?
I came into F1 in 2007 and the cars haven’t really changed dramatically since then, though we do have KERS and the DRS on the car this year that haven’t been there before. The cars are complicated, they have many systems fitted to them, and those systems tend to be complicated too – but I think we’re a lucky generation of engineers because, although we have more complications, we also have many more skilled staff to deal with those complications.
Look at an F1 team 25-30 years ago and there might have been 10 people in the team; now we have 45 across the two cars. There’s a specific engineer for the gearbox, another for the engine, the KERS, the electronics and so on. The real difficulty for the race engineer is coordinating all of these people and jobs and making sure everything matches up as it is supposed to.
Daniel Ricciardo is driving the other car in FP1 this weekend, but when he’s in Jaime’s car and you have to switch the settings between Friday morning and Friday afternoon practice, does that create a lot of extra work?
No, it really doesn’t. In fact it hardly creates any work at all. Usually when you change drivers, you have to change the seat and the pedal board and maybe the amount of ballast in the car. In the case of Daniel he doesn’t need a different pedal board to Seb or Jaime, and he weighs the same as Jaime so we don’t need to move any ballast. All we have to do is swap over the seat and the seatbelts – and that takes about five minutes.
As for the effect on the programme, at the moment he’s working through the same programme that Jaime would do for us if he were in the car. Daniel is a good driver and he’s doing a good job and we don’t have to change anything we want to do in order to accommodate him.
And overall, is this season tougher for a race engineer than is has been before? It’s certainly going to be the longest on record…
I think it’s more or less the same as last year, because we have the same number of races and the same number of tests. It’s a lot of work and we’re away from home for quite a long time, but the really important thing is whether or not you enjoy the work you’re doing. If you’re enjoying it – and I am – then there’s no problem.
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