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It was not a four-team battle for pole position that seemed possible during practice sessions for the Spanish Grand Prix. Lando Norris and Max Verstappen – in that order – stepped things up when it mattered to leave Mercedes and Ferrari more than three tenths behind. So what is responsible for the change in pattern?
There are two sides to this question. Why were Red Bull and McLaren suddenly able to pull 0.3 seconds on cars that were in the hundreds? So, how have the dynamics between Red Bull and McLaren changed?
Carlos Sainz – sixth fastest but in the same 10th place with Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc ahead of him and the Mercedes cars of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton ahead of them – gave as good an answer to the first question as he is likely to get. He added: “We realized that in Q2 of the race, Red Bull and McLaren, when they showed up [the PU]“They are overtaking us… When I look back at Suzuka, China, and the high-speed intermediate tracks, and the long corners, it reminds me of Barcelona where we were also a bit further away.”
He is not talking about the issue of power. It means that as corner approach speeds increase in the highest PU modes, the Ferrari (and perhaps Mercedes as well), veers into aerodynamic bounce territory.
It’s present all the time in all the cars around Barcelona but intensifies less in the Red Bull and McLaren as fast corner entry speed approaches. This extra speed from the higher positions (to Turns 9 and 14 in particular) brings the edges of the rear floor near the point of the tunnel a little closer to the ground, and this phenomenon is effective.
In low power modes and low approach speeds in practice, the Ferrari was no worse than the Red Bull and Sainz – quickest in FP3 – was dreaming of challenging for pole position at his home circuit. It was a mirage, as it turned out.
He continued: “We are struggling at high speed.” “We still have that bounce phenomenon that gives us a very hard time. It kills the tire a little bit in Sector 3 as well. When you have high side load in a high-speed corner, you get bounce.”
All four Mercedes and Ferrari drivers were in a time of 1 minute and 11.7 seconds. Norris and Verstappen were one minute and 11.3 seconds apart, separated by two hundred. My role is different, as it turned out.
There were other factors contributing to this, particularly the cooler track conditions in qualifying. This feeds into the answer to the second question as well. Temperatures on Friday respectively were between 45-47 degrees Celsius. At FP3 they were still at a very warm 41 degrees. By qualifying, that dropped to 36 degrees and suddenly the tires were performing much better. The increased force combined with increased tire grip accentuates this rebound effect. It was better controlled on the Red Bull and McLaren and those two fast turns at 9 and 14 highlighted the effect.
Red Bull is still the best ever at those super-fast corners. It’s comfortably flat through them. In FP3, with Sainz and Norris lapping at roughly the same pace as Verstappen, both had to do a short lift through the final corner at 280km/h (Sainz dropped to 61% throttle, Norris to 70%). They were taking time out of the Red Bull through the slower turns as the RB20 was experiencing further understeer.
Therefore, after Red Bull re-evaluated in the third free practice. There will likely be time to go at RB20, but it won’t be easy to get there. “The car was not stable enough,” Verstappen explained why they chose to use a larger wing in qualifying.
With the original wing, the car’s balance would not only have made it harder to extract its potential, it would have given the tires a harder time as well. Tire degradation is heavy here and will likely be what determines who wins. So it seemed logical to go to the larger suite.
But then came a cooler path, which would have helped them solve their balance problems. So perhaps there was no need to switch to the winger, which Verstappen deemed “a bit bold for qualifying”.
This balance issue was all in low and medium speed cornering. In the fast stuff, Red Bull’s advantage under the floor always seems to be growing. But, as we mentioned yesterday, the balance between low and high speed with all of these cars is on a knife’s edge as they have been developed to run ever lower before meeting the rebound threshold. The Red Bull was faster and safer than the McLaren at high speeds, but the McLaren resolved the conflict between low and high speed balance better.
Which brings us to the moment of confrontation: the final rounds of Q3, with Verstappen temporarily in first place, more than 0.1 seconds behind Norris. It would have been easy for Norris to give up, but since McLaren has become a fully competitive car recently, he has been focusing on pulling more out of himself in crucial moments. And now was one of those moments. “I’ve talked the last few weeks about not having that ability to open up something more in qualifying – and kind of finding the edge and getting stuck a little bit. I found it difficult to progress from there and get into a nice flow and rhythm.
“So we’ve been working hard on the simulator and with my team to try to improve all these things because compared to others, compared to Oscar in some areas, I wasn’t comfortable and I wasn’t confident that I could. Go out and do what I have to do to get it done but this weekend I came With a different approach and reset some things and I definitely feel like I’m in a better place.
“In the last two months, the car has been getting where I want it to be – certainly not where I need it where I’m more confident, but we’re working on it and all credit to the team because without the car we are today I wouldn’t be in pole position.
How exactly was all of this translated? Verstappen was out in front of him and improved on his provisional position by more than a quarter of a second.
“There were some places I knew I had to improve,” Norris recalls. “It was all about the high-speed stuff. So I knew I had to get rid of the balls and do it…. Turns 9 and 14 were the turns where the car is going, and it’s bouncing a little bit, and it doesn’t give you confidence when the car is going at that high speed. It’s completely unpredictable, which is unnerving at these speeds.
“To commit and know when to take risks… Over the weekend, I pushed the limits but maybe not at very high speeds where the consequences are more. But after looking at the data, I was losing almost two tenths to Max in just those two corners were the corners I was There’s less comfort in them and it was just about committing and hoping to come out the other side in one piece. That’s what I had to do on that last lap and that’s exactly what I did. It was pretty much a perfect lap and probably the best I’ve ever done.
Comparing his first run in Q3 to his last, the telemetry shows a rise in confidence to 92% in braking into Turn 9 on the first go, but 100% commitment on the final run. It takes it out into the back straight at 1 km/h.
At the final turn, on the first lap of Q3, the lift dropped to 80% at the halfway point (up from 70% in FP3) but in the final lap that lift reached 91%. It’s still not 100% Verstappen, but the McLaren didn’t have the same amount of downforce as the Red Bull.
“Yes, I think the way the grip on the track increased as the temperature dropped meant that there wasn’t a lot of potential for me to improve, because we were already pretty consistent through those corners,” Verstappen said. “Whereas for Lando’s car there was a lot to gain from Stay the course.”
This was the story of one of the greatest qualifying encounters in Formula 1. Perhaps the first of many between these two.
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