Robert Kubica: “I will try my best to extract the maximum from the car”
Robert, Silverstone was a tricky weekend for you, culminating in your first retirement of the year. Talk us through it… In the end, we were struggling with the general grip of the car and our feeling on the performance side was that we were less competitive than we had been at the previous race. Everything was looking grey until the final part of qualifying, but I managed to qualify sixth which I think was quite surprising looking at our performance up to that point. It was even more surprising to be third in the first stint, after a good start and a good first lap, but our pace wasn’t great in the race and, even before the driveshaft problem, the car didn’t feel like it usually does. I think much of it was down to circuit characteristics because our least competitive circuits this year have been Barcelona and Silverstone, both of which have a lot of high-speed corners.
Looking to Hockenheim, do you expect the R30 to better suit this circuit? It’s a more normal track with a more normal mix of corners. There are two very high-speed corners, at turn 1 and turn 12, and the rest are low and medium-speed. The track surface is very smooth, so you have to get the absolute maximum out of the car’s mechanical grip, and there is also one very long straight, where you have to make sure the car is competitive on top speed. All the cars we are racing already have an f-duct system, and this makes our life harder because we may have to reduce downforce to be competitive on top speed, which could cost us in the corners. We will have to evaluate the best compromise for us on Friday.
For this race, there will be a bigger gap between the tyre compounds, with Bridgestone bringing the super-soft and the hard tyres. What challenges will that present? At first sight, the super-soft may struggle to do even one lap in qualifying and the hard compound could go on forever! The weather and the track conditions will have a big influence on how they perform: from experience, it will be tricky to make the super-soft tyre work properly, while the hard tyre should be okay. The other factor is that we may see a big balance shift between compounds, and that may make the weekend quite tricky and interesting from the tyre point of view.
What are your performance expectations for the weekend? As usual, I will try to do my best and to extract the maximum from the car. Most of the teams we are racing now have both the f-duct and the blown floor, so I think it could be quite a tough weekend, and we need to make sure that our pace is more competitive than at the last race. But if it’s what we call a tough weekend for us is like in Silverstone, when we still could have finished P4 or P5, then I’ll take it straight away.
Vitaly Petrov: “The target is to be as close to Robert as possible”
Vitaly, let’s look back to Silverstone - another promising race ruined by a puncture… I enjoyed the race but, of course, I was disappointed with the outcome. I was almost in the points when I had some bad luck with the puncture, so we could have got a much better result. But what is done is done, and it was still good to finish all 52 laps of the race. This gives us lots of information about the car and the track, which was especially important with Robert’s race ending early.
You now have ten races behind you, what is your frame of mind as we enter the second half of the season? I’m looking forward to the rest of the season and using the experience that I have gained so far. I know that I still need to improve, but I’m doing my best to work more closely with the team and Robert to improve the car. I feel that I have a really good relationship with the team and we know each other pretty well by now. We spend a lot of time together, we go to dinner together and I spend a lot of time at the factory. Being very close with them will help me get the most from every weekend.
As a rookie, each race is a big learning experience. Where do you feel you can still improve? I think that the information and feedback I give the team is something that is very important. When we have a new upgrade, we need to have a good understanding of how it works and how it improves the car, and it’s down to me to give the team the right information. Being accurate with my feedback is also important for improving the set-up and getting the most from the car so this is where I am working hard.
Looking ahead to this weekend’s race in Germany, what are your views on the Hockenheim circuit? I know the circuit because I’ve raced there before in GP2. It’s quite a difficult track and there is usually close racing so you need to be quite tactical with your driving. There are some corners where you can overtake, like the hairpin at the end of the long back straight. Overall I think it should be a good circuit for our car.
What are your objectives for the weekend? As always the first target is to be close to Robert’s pace. Then I need to qualify in the top ten and finish the race. I think that qualifying is my number one priority for the weekend because we know how it important it is for the outcome of the race.
Robert’s guide to Hockenheim
I enjoy Hockenheim and I’m looking forward to going back there for the first time since 2008. It’s an interesting track, although I feel the old Hockenheim circuit had much more character, but I never raced it. It’s a track where sometimes you are very quick and you don’t know why, and sometimes you are slow and you don’t know why. I find it quite tricky to find the right balance and optimum performance, but it’s a track where you can find a good rhythm.
In terms of the set-up, it’s the kind of track where you need everything. There is a long straight so you need quite a good top speed, but you also need downforce for the final sector. So there are two different ways to approaching Hockenheim: some cars are very quick in the first and second sector and then struggle in the final sector, where you need the downforce. Other cars do the opposite, sacrificing their top speed, but doing very well in the third sector, the stadium complex.
The current track has a couple of corners that are quite interesting, especially turns one and 12 – which are both high-speed. When you look at turn one from outside of the car, you would not imagine that you would go so quickly through this corner because it’s so short, but you can carry quite a lot of speed actually. Turn 12, the entry to the stadium, is also a nice corner, although lately you are not able to use so much of the outside kerb because there is some artificial grass and that makes it quite a tricky place.
All the other corners are medium to low-speed corners and are quite tricky. Turns 16 and 17, for example, which make up a double right-hander just before the start-finish line create quite a lot of understeer. It’s a long corner and a bit off-camber and it’s a bit like a double-apex corner.
Turn 13 is quite interesting. There’s a lot of camber so you can go very deep into the apex and get quite early on power. Of course, you have to watch that you don’t lose the car out of the camber in the exit of the corner.
The best overtaking opportunity is the big braking zone before turn six, which is a really low-speed hairpin after the long straight. It’s a first gear corner and we have seen lots of action there in the past.
Inside the engineers’ truck
Weighing in at 35 and a half tonnes, the Renault F1 Team’s engineering truck is an impressive piece of kit. It’s a home away from home for the engineers; a mobile office with working space for 30 people. It’s where some of the key decisions are made during the race weekend, a sanctuary for the drivers to debrief and a quiet place where the engineers can pore over the data.
“The truck is the hub from the point of view of engineering the car,” explains Vitaly’s race engineer, Mark Slade. “In the lead up to the race, it’s where all the information comes in, and where everything gets decided, especially during the practice sessions when we’re concentrating on setting up the car.”
So who’s in there calling the shots? Well, each driver has a team of engineers monitoring his every move on the racetrack. While the race engineer spends the sessions on the pit wall and in the garage, the back-up team consists of a performance engineer, a control systems engineer and two engine engineers. To do their jobs they have a vast array of computer screens and monitors to follow the action, as Robert’s performance engineer, Jon Marshall, explains:
“All the engineers use two laptops, simply because of the number of software packages we run to monitor the car – it would be too much for one machine. So we each have four monitors running from two laptops. Above those we have another bank of screens with the TV feed and timing data. There’s even a web cam set up in the garage so that we can see the state of the car without having to leave the truck. In total, I think there are over 60 screens just in the one truck.”
During the sessions, the control system engineers have the task of making sure all the systems on the car are working correctly, while the performance engineers concentrate on extracting the most from those systems. If they spot anything in the data that could improve performance, or could lead to a failure on the car, they’ll be straight on the radio to inform the race engineer. In fact, it was their quick reactions at Silverstone that spotted a slow puncture on Vitaly’s car. They made the call to pit the car, avoiding a potentially dangerous situation.
When each session is over, the drivers usually head straight to the truck to begin downloading their thoughts in the traditional debrief. Before the engineers start analysing the data, they hang on the driver’s every word because it influences how they interpret the data. “Obviously one of the problems with analysing data is the fact that the driver is driving in a way that gets around the problems with the car,” explains Mark. “So the data will not necessarily show you what issues you have with the car. You have to find out why he’s doing things the way he is, and then identify the issues you need to resolve.”
But surely with so many laps completed, and so much data to analyse, it can feel a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack? How do they know where to begin? “That’s part of the skill,” smiles Jon. “It’s all about focussing on the problems that are relevant, or the opportunities to improve. So we have a regimented list that we go through to cover all the major systems on the car.”
