Australian Grand Prix Technical Preview

Additionally, the track is hard on the brakes, containing a number of large stops which pose a reliability challenge. With the race taking place in the early evening, and trees surrounding the circuit, the track temperature can fall rapidly, creating difficulties with tyre temperatures.

Albert Park is not a track with the extremes of Monaco or Monza, in terms of downforce and drag. While there are a number of straights, they are not particularly long, so teams are reluctant to take too much downforce off the car for drag reduction.

Additionally, this track is notoriously one on which overtaking is difficult, so qualifying is particularly crucial, favouring higher downforce. Hence, teams will probably tend to set-up the car with a little more downforce than average, and as a result, a little more drag.

If anything, Melbourne places a greater role on car balance and mechanical grip than outright downforce through Aerodynamics. Corners are generally short and sharp, in contrast to the sweeping turns of Barcelona, where pre-season testing took place. An adaptable car is also of importance – this means a car with a wide operating window, such that set-up changes can be made to tune it to the particular conditions and the driver’s feel.

There are three corners of particular importance at Albert Park. Two of them, Turns 11 and 12, make up a quick corner complex, which will be taken in seventh gear and with Turn 12 perhaps being flat-out. Additionally, this sequence is one of the more Aerodynamically dependent on the track, meaning a good car through here is a positive indicator for the rest of the season.

Secondly, the penultimate corner, Turn 15, is a tricky one to navigate without locking up in qualifying, which can force the car wide. This not only loses time on the spot, but also compromises the line through the final corner and reduces top speed on the pit straight. This corner is also vital to any overtaking attempts at the start of the next lap, so is one to watch during the race.

Tyres are almost as much of an unknown going into this season as they were at the same point last year. Pirelli’s mission was to make the tyres one step softer than previously, while also adding the HyperSoft and SuperHard to bookend its 2017 range. However, in practice, the delta between the Medium, Soft, SuperSoft and UltraSoft compounds appears to be smaller than expected and the data provided by Pirelli post-testing will not be wholly reliable, with the only running done so far being on the newly re-laid Barcelona track.

Last year, it was possible to do a one-stop race, starting on the UltraSofts and finishing on the SuperSofts, relatively comfortably – indeed, race-winner Vettel ran on used UltraSofts until Lap 23. Therefore, it would be reasonable to expect an UltraSoft-Soft one-stop would be possible in 2018, if not an UltraSoft-SuperSoft strategy, although the cooler and cloudier conditions could force teams on to the latter.

This is because of the new working range limits for the tyres in 2018 – Pirelli has now designed the tyres such that the softer the tyre, the lower the working range, which was part of the reason McLaren favoured the softer compounds in the cold pre-season testing conditions. As such, the Softs will have a higher working range than the SuperSofts which could cause problems late in the race, as ambient/track temperatures tend to drop off.

As discussed above, overtaking is difficult, although a new feature has been introduced this year at Albert Park, namely a third DRS zone. In reality, this is unlikely to make any difference given the short straight between Turns 12 and 13, with the high-speed complex prior to this preventing any cars from following each other closely. This extra DRS zone may push teams to run higher downforce set-ups since they can achieve a higher top speed on one of the power dependent areas of the circuit.

Friday’s running is set to take place in sunny, hot conditions, very different to those expected for the rest of the weekend, with a high probability of rain for qualifying before cool, dry conditions for the race. This will make it difficult for the teams to collect long run and tyre data on Friday that will be relevant to Sunday’s conditions, increasing unpredictability.

Predicting a new season is always very difficult given the different tyre compounds, fuel loads, power modes and set-ups run during pre-season testing. Further to this, many teams bring substantial upgrade packages to the first race, further mixing up the order (Force India and McLaren are such teams this year). Nevertheless, what is clear is that the top three teams are unchanged from 2017, albeit with a shifted order.

It appears as if Mercedes could end up further ahead than last season, having fixed the difficult set-up characteristics of the W08, while Red Bull may have jumped ahead of Ferrari, although both are set to bring upgrades to Australia. The midfield is almost impossible to predict, but Haas, Renault and McLaren look to be leading it, with Sauber still at the back, although much closer than last year.

See further analysis by Iman Hansra here>>>