F1
Learning Curves: LVGP
What did F1 learn about the Las Vegas Strip Circuit from its 2023 debut?
Despite portents of arctic doom and a bit of driver grumbling, the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix produced a thrilling race. It did, however, present challenging conditions for F1’s teams, and many of those same conditions will exist in 2024. So what exactly did teams learn last year—and are there technical adjustments to be made?
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1. “Switching on the times is very difficult"
F1 tires have a working range in which they provide a high level of grip—but it really is a Goldilocks zone: too hot or too cold and they don’t work well. In most races, the problem is keeping the tires cool; but in Vegas it was getting them warm. The freshly laid surface was too slippery to make the tires bite, and the long straight robbed the tires of temperature. This year, teams will step up efforts to promote tire warm-up by doing complicated- sounding things like altering the brake bias and heating the rims from the hot brakes.
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2. There's likely to be lots of "Graming"
When talking about tires, temperatures last year were a secondary problem compared to the phenomenon of “graining.” That term is used to describe how rubber peels off the tire surface in strips, and immediately re-adheres to the tread, making it pilled. This reduces grip and drivers feel like they’re running on marbles. Some days it goes away when the tires wear down again; on others it’s an ever-present problem.
“Last year, we had graining in Las Vegas, and obviously this affected the performance of the tire a lot,” says Simone Berra, Pirelli’s chief engineer. “The effect was massive compared to other circuits, caused by a combination of the freshly laid asphalt, the low grip level and the low temperatures. The setup of the cars also didn’t help to work the tires properly. I’d expect a similar situation this year.”
Las Vegas is one of the few street circuits on the F1 schedule.
© Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images
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3. It's dirty on the Las Vegas Strip circuit
Civic leaders tend to bristle when their city streets are described by F1 as being “dirty,” but it isn’t intended as a slight on the Department of Sanitation. Street circuits pull all sorts of debris onto the racing line in ways that fundamentally don’t happen on a permanent racetrack. “Tire prep last year wasn’t great; the surface was very dirty,” says Berra. “It’s a little bit like Monaco in this regard: a street circuit, open to traffic after the sessions, bringing dirt back onto the racing line, so it always takes time to clean up, and at the start of each day, the drivers will take a while to gain confidence.”
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4. Overtaking is (relatively) easy
Last year’s race featured 81 overtaking moves. That’s a lot. “It’s definitely an overtaking-friendly layout,” says Spini. “We expected to see this, though last year there were a few fast cars starting at the back of the grid, which perhaps artificially increased that number. Nevertheless, there’s no reason to expect anything different this year.”
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5. Multiple pit stops are possible
Easy overtaking encourages teams to add pit stops. Last year’s race featured a tantalizing mix of faster two-stopping cars chasing down drivers that were going long on one-stop strategies. It’s very difficult to know which is the correct approach this time around. “It will depend on tire behavior,” says Spini, offering a detailed explanation. “If the tire behaves: one-stop. It’s a low-energy circuit, tire wear is low, so if degradation [tire heating] is also low, you can go forever. But if you have graining, that’s a different situation. A new tire will behave better, and so you’d be forced to move to a two-stop. A safety car is another variable. In those situations, restarting a hard tire that has cooled after a safety-car period is going to be very difficult. You’re forced to pit and fit a new tire. It’s going to be a big challenge.”
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6. The teams need to run cars with drag settings
The Las Vegas Circuit is very quick. McLaren’s Oscar Piastri set the fastest lap of the race—his 1:35.490 time equates to an average speed of 145 mph—while Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was the fastest driver through the speed trap, reaching 218 mph. Most of the teams did not, however, run the lowest drag settings, preferring instead to keep a bit more downforce on their cars.
Mattia Spini, senior race engineer for the VCARB team, explains: “We ran with a low drag/low downforce car but not quite at the lowest level, which we use in Monza [site of the Italian Grand Prix], but similar to what we have at Spa- Francorchamps [the track that hosts the Belgian Grand Prix]. We want low drag to reach very high top speeds on the long straight, either to attack or defend a position—but that doesn’t help with tire warm-up, so there is a trade-off in the setup.”
