Why FP1 Will Be Vitally Important at Spa

The singular practice session in the Sprint weekend format is always crucial, as we look to lock in our car set-ups.

It'll be even more vital in Belgium.

60 minutes to find a Formula One car's sweet spot is a huge challenge for everyone up and down the grid. Once FP1 ends on a Sprint weekend, there's very little opportunity to change things due to Parc fermé restrictions coming into effect before qualifying.

Spa-Francorchamps is one of F1's classic tracks. An iconic layout featuring some incredibly difficult sections of track. It's not an easy one to find the right set-up for and this will become even more of difficult given the lack of practice time.

"As with any other Sprint, you only get the one hour of practice to set up the car," says Riccardo Musconi, Head of Trackside Performance. "But Spa has some unique challenges. Eau Rouge is a peculiar load case to set ride heights for, due to the down and up nature of this sequence and how the car is compressed into the ground.

"It also has a very wide corner speed spectrum, so the set-up requires more compromises than other venues. This means practice will become very crucial. And due to the long lap, you get very few timed laps on the board in practice."

This is an important point, because in an hour-long session, the maximum number of 'useful' laps for understanding pace and tyre performance will be around 10 circuits. Total lap count could be as high as 24 but that tally includes cooldown laps and wouldn't include trips back to the garage to change tyres and make set-up tweaks.

With those limited number of laps, you're getting less data on car performance and have a more limited window to make tweaks. You really must maximise every lap out there to get as much information as possible, try and complete a clean session without disruptions and prioritise what set-up changes you want to try.

Whereas the old Sprint format would give you the chance to focus on low-fuel in FP1 on Friday morning and high-fuel in FP2 on Saturday morning, the new format gives us just one session to gather both high and low fuel data.

Therefore, you are never able to complete a "full" programme on different fuel loads and have less data available ahead of qualifying and the Sprint. It's also harder to make sense of the data and where everyone is at due to the variability of run plans.

But on the flip side, the Sprint gives us a lot more information that's useful for the main race, giving us a better understanding of pace and tyre performance that we can take into Sunday.

Another interesting challenge for our Team this weekend is that we're bringing more updates to the W14 for Spa-Francorchamps. The lack of practice time will mean we don't have as much time to dial in the set-up with these new parts before qualifying and the races.

But these new parts are more specific to lower downforce tracks so we wanted to make the most of them at Spa and also ensure we are bringing performance on a weekend where there are more points up for grabs.

Due to the lack of practice time, the simulator running pre-race weekend becomes even more crucial.

Due to the lack of practice time, the simulator running pre-race weekend becomes even more crucial, to get those starting set-ups in a good place for the sole practice session. Both Lewis and George have been in the Driver-in-the-Loop (DiL) simulator to ensure we're as prepared as possible.

The weather is also a unique factor of Spa-Francorchamps. It's notoriously changeable - we've only had one totally dry weekend in the last five years - and it's also very common for conditions to vary across the lap itself. Some parts of the track can be bone dry while at the opposite end of the circuit, it's soaking wet.

"This means we often have less data going into the race compared to other circuits and are more reliant on pre-event preparation work to set our plans for the race," says Rosie Wait, our Head of Race Strategy.

But with so much focus on FP1 in Belgium this weekend, what happens if it's wet, but the later sessions are dry? Which is a possibility...

"If FP1 is wet then all teams will go into the Sprint and main race using pre-event models, which are based on past races," Rosie explains. "Given we have a lot of data from this track, our pre-event models should be pretty good, so the impact won't be as big as newer circuits. If the Sprint is dry, we might see more variability in tyre choice, and this will be a valuable source of data for the main race."

Whatever the weather in Spa, all eyes in the Team will be on ensuring we get as many laps in as possible in FP1 and extract all the data we can from the limited opportunities we have.

Belgian Grand Prix Schedule