Coping With The Qatar Heat And The Vegas Cold

We explore how climate and weather impact an F1 car in our latest video

"Across the season, we see a huge range of conditions both in temperature, in atmospheric pressures, but also wet and dry."

Chief Technical Officer Mike Elliott outlines one of the key challenges of F1. How do you design and operate a car that works optimally across a vast array of climates? In 2023, we will visit 19 different countries over nine months.

We race in the day and the night, in the wind, the rain, the dry. We will encounter daily highs of 40°C this weekend in Qatar, but likely single digit figures in the cool desert night of Las Vegas.

Ensuring the W14 can cope with these different conditions is no easy feat. It is something we need to think about when it comes to every aspect of design.

Georgios Chimonides, Trackside Power Unit Engineer, explains: "The goal we have with the Power Unit is to always have optimum performance without any reliability issues. From a performance standpoint, what we are trying to achieve is maximum performance throughout the operating envelope so we can adapt to any different weather conditions."

What about tyres? "They are incredibly sensitive to temperature," explains Simulation and Performance Engineer, Oliver Albert. "Not having the tyres in the correct working window for a given lap can be worth easily tenths of a second. Our job is primarily trying to get that tyre and put it in the right window."

These are two obvious factors that are impacted by climate and weather. An area you may not think about though is aerodynamics. Mike comments: "Mexico City, where the air density is very low, gives us challenges in cooling. It also gives us challenges in terms of trying to generate as much downforce as we possible can. We run maximum downforce because the air density is so low, the downforce of the car is low, and the drag compared to a circuit at sea level is low."

We head to Las Vegas later in the year. That could present a unique challenge. "You might think of Las Vegas as a hot city but this is a night race. At night and in the winter, it can get very cold. When we go there in November, we'll expect to see single digit Celsius temperatures," Mike explains. Oliver adds: "It's quite possible we will be seeing some of the coldest conditions we have had all year."

Watch the full video below to find out more.