Canada Preview Quotes: Renault

Jarno Trulli

Q: Jarno, the last two races have gone very well for you - what are your feelings about the past three weeks?

Trulli: "Well, I think as a team we have had a very good period. The win in Monaco was fantastic for everybody in the team, and for me too, but maybe the N?rburgring was a bit more realistic in terms of where we are now, even though I was unlucky with some incidents during the race. Everybody is still pushing very hard - we might be second in the championship, but there is no complacency. Indianapolis is only halfway through the season, and anything can still happen, so we need to push ahead with our development, keep our good reliability and try and make the most of every opportunity that comes our way."

Q: In terms of the circuit at Montreal, what is it like to drive?

Trulli: "You need a low downforce set-up, and that makes things more difficult: the car feels lighter, and more critical to drive. It is as if you are always on the limit, when you are braking and turning in. But that is how the circuit is - our job is to get used to it. In the past, our car has always been quite competitive at this circuit, and the engine is much better now than last year - we should have another step for Canada. It will be a difficult race, but I am looking ahead with confidence."

Q: What about the trip to North America, are you looking forward to it?

Trulli: "For sure. I enjoy the lifestyle in Canada and America - it is more relaxed, very friendly - and it is good to get out of Europe for a little while. The two tracks we race at are quite different to what we have in this part of the season so that will be another challenge, and then I will actually be working between the races, trying to develop my wine in America. So it will be a busy few weeks!"

Fernando Alonso

Q: Canada needs good engine power and good aerodynamics. Last year, you finished fourth - can you do better this year?

Alonso: "Well, we know the car has improved in both of these areas, but predictions are difficult - each race has been different, and at the moment, our competitiveness depends a lot on how well we manage the weekend, and how good a set-up we can find. Overall, I think we can be strong, because this is a team with a lot of experience and motivation. Our car has good traction out of slow corners and is good under braking, which are two important areas in Montreal. I think we should be looking for podium finishes to maintain our championship position."

Q: From a personal point of view, how happy are you with your season so far?

Alonso: "I have mixed feelings, because it could have been better, I think. We have been very reliable, and that has given us a strong position in the championship as we approach the halfway stage of the season, but it will be a big fight to stay where we are. The team is pushing hard to improve the car and the engine, but it then comes down to us as drivers to get the most out of our package. I have been disappointed with my results in the past few races, and I definitely want to improve things as we move into the summer."

Q: What are the challenges from the driver's perspective in Montreal?

Alonso: "The car is always nervous because of the low downforce levels, which makes things more difficult - you have to push as much as possible like in every other race, but it is harder to drive the car on the limit. The chicanes at Montreal are not like other circuits - in Imola you can really attack them and be aggressive, whereas you have to be smoother in Canada. It is quite a difficult balance between attacking enough to be fast and not pushing too far, because it is quite easy to step over the limit. The barriers are very close if you do, so you cannot afford any mistakes at all."

Bob Bell

Q: What developments will we see on the car for Canada?

Bell: "We will have aerodynamic developments, plus an engine upgrade as well. There is a constant stream of improvements planned for the next races as we move through the halfway point of the season. We are not under any illusion that these will suddenly take us to Ferrari's level, but they will certainly allow us to remain competitive with our closest rivals. We will continue to focus on performance throughout the summer."

Q: Prior to the European Grand Prix, you had said the race would be a sort of acid test for the recent improvements to the car. What was the conclusion?

Bell: "I think that our recent gains represent a real step forward in our understanding and use of the car, although there is still plenty of scope for improvement. On this level, we have further changes and developments programmed that should see us move further in the right direction."

Q: In terms of the two upcoming flyaway races, what level of competitiveness do you expect?

Bell: "Circuits that require higher levels of downforce, and place greater demands on the aero package, certainly favour us more than the two forthcoming races are likely to. These two circuits are standard ones for the team - we should be competitive, without necessarily springing any great surprises. Canada in particular places a particular emphasis on managing the weekend properly, and dealing with the challenges of the heavy braking - as a team, that is something we deal with very well. We raced strongly at both places last year, and managed to collect good points-scoring finishes. We will be aiming for the podium once again, and looking to maintain our extremely profitable reliability record."

Q: Are regular podium finishes still the objective at every race?

Bell: "I think they remain a very realistic aim. At the moment, we do not have a package that will allow us to worry Ferrari on a race-by-race basis, but the R24 is fundamentally a very good car, and performs well aerodynamically. We know where our weaknesses lie, but the team is a very strong one, our reliability has been exceptional and the drivers are performing consistently. I don't think anybody can rule us out of the podium positions, and if the circumstances fall to us, then - as we have proved already this year - we are more than capable of winning."

Rob White

Q: Rob, the team has evolutions to the engine for the upcoming races: what will they be?

White: "The changes for Canada are performance improvements to the RS24B introduced at Imola. These are tuning changes, including new cam profiles, to improve the maximum power and power curve shape of the engine. The build spec for USA will be similar to Canada, with adjustments to how the engines are operated to account for lessons learned on the dyno and for the differences between the two circuits."

Q: Is introducing a new engine spec ahead of these North American races more challenging than ahead of other races?

White: "The logistics are a little tough. The engines for USA must be built before the Canada engines are used, let alone stripped and inspected. This is not a surprise: the calendar is well known, and does not present any difficulties if the news from strip-down is good. If there are any concerns following Canada, the options to respond are more limited. However, we have run a thorough test programme both on and off track, and are confident in the engine's ability to perform to our expectations."

Q: What are the main challenges for the engine at each venue, Montreal and Indianapolis?

White: "Canada is a circuit that is mechanically demanding of the race car, with fierce acceleration and equally severe braking around the lap. Indy is a circuit of 2 halves: nearly half a lap of the famous Brickyard oval which is the longest full throttle event of the calendar, then the infield of slower twisty turns with substantially lower duty cycle. In their different ways, both are extremely demanding of the engine, and we need to be fully confident in the material at our disposal before introducing evolutions at either venue."

Q: This race will mark the second engine evolution of the year: how satisfied are you with progress?

White: "The progress of the RS24 is very pleasing, and is the result of a huge effort by the entire Viry group, in collaboration with the team at Enstone. We have disciplined, rigorous processes that are extremely exacting, but undoubtedly paying dividends this season: as we saw in the last race, our reliability is allowing us to pick up a significant number of points when our rivals falter, and the R24-RS24 package has been competitive at every type of circuit. The contribution of the race and test support teams should also be acknowledged - they have maintained an impressive strike-rate and their combined efforts have allowed us to extract the best from the car at almost every race."

Q: What does it mean to the team at Viry that the RS24 is already a race-winner after such a compressed development programme?

White: "Viry was buzzing after the win in Monaco. Monaco is a special place, and an important race to win. It was fantastic to see Jarno cross the line first and then to hear La Marseillaise during the victory ceremony. The win brings us confidence, but also strengthens our resolve to repeat the experience."

The Engineer's View

Pat Symonds

"Formula 1 cars, in common with military aircraft and a few of the more modern passenger aircraft, use a brake material that is significantly different to what we find on road cars. A typical road car uses a cast iron brake disc with an organic brake pad. In an F1 car, though, the same material is used for both disc and pad, and this material is known as carbon-carbon - a significantly different material to the carbon-fibre composites used in the rest of the car. Carbon-carbon is essentially a pure form of carbon and is both extremely light (approx. 50% of the weight of standard materials) and also possesses a higher coefficient of friction at the correct operating temperatures. This peaks at around 0.6, compared to 0.3 for conventional materials.

"Manufacturing carbon-carbon discs is a lengthy process which takes hundreds of hours, and involves the materials being heated to 2500°C. The complexity of the procedure also explains the other major property of carbon-carbon brake discs and pads: cost. A set of brake discs (four) costs $4500, while a set of pads (eight) is $2400, and the team will use over 200 discs in a year, and double the number of pads.

"When we assess brake performance, we do so largely in terms of two parameters: bite and consistency. Bite is the initial friction experienced when the driver first presses the brake pedal and the brakes are not yet at the correct operating temperature. Consistency is a measure of how consistent the friction is for the duration of the braking period. Carbon-carbon brakes possess very particular properties, A carbon brake has relatively poor performance below about 400°C and has optimum braking performance above 650°C. Unfortunately, whereas conventional brakes wear down through the normal mechanism of wear that any frictional material experiences, a carbon brake not only suffers wear through this mechanism but also a process called oxidisation.

"Oxidisation is in simple terms a burning of the surface of the disc, and at temperatures above 600°C it is accelerated and becomes the main mechanism of wear. Bearing in mind that during a braking event the temperatures of the brake discs will reach around 1200°C, it can be seen that oxidisation is extremely significant in the brake wear process. On the straights of course, the brake ducts are feeding air to the brakes and so they drop below the oxidisation temperature but as they still maintain these high temperatures for a relatively long time, paradoxically the very air that is being used to cool them contains a high amount of oxygen that accelerates the wear process.

"The other factor that is very circuit-dependent is the cooling of the brakes. The brakes on all racing cars are cooled by forcing air through the ducts and blowing it both through the radial centre vents of the disc itself and also over the surface of the pads and discs. The amount of air is controlled by using different size ducts and for a heavy braking circuit such as Montreal, we are forced to use some of the biggest ducts of the season. Moving from the smallest to largest cooling ducts can cost 1.5% in aerodynamic efficiency, which represents a loss of 1 kph in top speed. Indeed, the size of the ducts is not driven simply by aerodynamic objectives: smaller ducts are used at circuits which demand less braking in order to manage the temperatures of the brakes and achieve the correct balance between high performance and acceptable wear rates.

"When an experienced racing driver first drives an F1 car, almost without exception, their first comment concerns the power of the brakes. A modern F1 car can achieve 5.5g under braking whereas even a high-performance road car will probably not reach 1g. Furthermore, F1 cars don't use power brakes so the driver has to press the pedal extremely hard to produce the brake pressure (up to 100 bar). Of course, when the brakes are first applied at 330 kph the car has very high downforce and consequently it is not possible to lock the wheels. However as the car slows down, not are the downforce and hence tyre grip reduced but also the brakes start coming into their optimum range: thus, the ability to transmit braking force effectively to the road reduces as the actual braking power increases.

"If the driver were to maintain the very high pedal forces it would not be long before the wheels locked, so the driver needs to modulate the brake pedal pressure to try and keep the wheels just at the point of locking. Unlike road driving, where braking is ideally all in a straight line, a racing driver will brake deep into the corner to try and reduce his lap-times. As the car experiences the combined braking and cornering forces, it is very easy to lock the inside front wheel. This would make the car understeer and miss the apex so again the driver needs to modulate his braking in order to avoid this. It is also interesting that while and F1 car has very high levels of downforce, it also has around 2.5 times the drag of a normal road car and at maximum speed, just lifting off the throttle without touching the brakes can cause deceleration of around 1g.

"Achieving braking performance alone is easy, as is minimising the aerodynamic penalty, but the secret, as ever in Formula 1, is to achieve maximum braking performance and minimum aerodynamic losses simultaneously. This is where Canada poses its real challenge, combining very low speed corners and chicanes with long straights - thus, both braking performance and aerodynamic efficiency are at an absolute premium. Furthermore, with low levels of downforce on the car, it is generally more nervous under braking, exactly what a driver doesn't want when he is looking for confidence and stability as he decelerates. Managing these challenges, both from the engineering and driving points of view, is one of the keys to a successful weekend in Montreal."

Denis Chevrier

"The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal is known for two things: braking, and engine torque. The pattern of any lap is relatively simple - you need to be able to build up a lot of speed very quickly, then shed it even faster for the tight corner that inevitably follows.

"Indeed, in spite of the high maximum speeds we see the cars reach there (the third highest of the season), Montreal is not actually a particularly demanding circuit in terms of the standard parameters by which we measure a circuit's difficulty. The engine only spends 58% of the lap at full throttle, while the longest period at full throttle is 13 seconds, almost identical to the season average.

"Rather, the challenge at Montreal comes in the form of the extremes at which the engine is required to operate. Not only do we record the third-highest maximum speeds of the year at this circuit, but it also sees the third-lowest engine speed of the year, in the hairpins. In terms of the breadth of performance an engine requires, Montreal is actually comparable to Monaco, but with slightly higher values in all areas.

"As such, a good engine in Canada needs to be a complete engine, without any weaknesses. It needs good power, but also driveability through the chicanes and good torque for launching out of the slower corners. In all of these areas, the RS24 constitutes a significant advance on last year's engine.

"Aside from these basic challenges, the circumstances and location of the circuit can also provide challenges for the engineers. The back straight prior to the final chicane can suffer from headwinds which make the calibration of the final drive difficult, while leaves and circuit debris have caused cooling problems in the past."