Hungary Preview Quotes: Renault

Jarno Trulli

Q. Jarno, the R24 is very strong in high-downforce configuration: can you repeat your Monaco success in Hungary?

JT:

I certainly hope we can perform as well as we did in Monaco! I was unlucky in Germany to be slowed by a very unusual problem, but I was very quick during the first part of the race and I am happy with our competitiveness. Although there has been a testing ban over the past weeks, we will have a new engine spec in Hungary, new aero parts and the track suits our car. We are confident of being very competitive.

Q. The Hungaroring is very dusty off line: how important is precision over a full race distance?

JT:

As usual, you have to keep pushing until the very end of the race, and maintain your concentration all the way through. In Hungary, there is also the problem of the circuit being very dirty off line - if you run wide you will lose positions because it takes a long time to clean the tyres off. So, you can't afford any mistakes.

Q. What are the main characteristics of the circuit from the driver's point of view?

JT:

It is quite a fun circuit to drive, with so many corners, but it is not comfortable: the track surface is very bumpy. We have to set the car up to give a lot of mechanical grip in the slower corners, but also run quite soft to make the car driveable over the bumps. Also the circuit changes a lot as the dust blows around, so it can be quite tricky to get the car handling well and going quickly.

Fernando Alonso

Q. Fernando, you are returning to the scene of your first Grand Prix win. How does it feel?

FA:

It is going to be a special race for me I think. This was always one of my favourite circuits anyway, and it is a nice feeling to look back and remember last year. I am feeling confident: we were fast in Hungary in 2003, we have been fast with maximum downforce already this season in Monaco, so I hope we can have a good race, and maybe be in with a chance to win.

Q. This is a circuit where overtaking is very difficult: what makes it fun to drive?

FA:

It is the style of the corners. They are quite slow, but very difficult to get right for the entire lap: you need a very precise style. Also, there are series of four or five corners where if you get one line wrong, it affects all the next corners too, so you cannot make any small mistakes. Plus it is high grip on the racing line, and very low grip and dusty off it. You can attack in some parts of the circuit, and need to be more cautious in others. The demands make it a big test for a driver.

Q. When working on set-up, what do you concentrate on?

FA:

Mechanical grip is the area we look at a lot. The downforce is at maximum, and the engine needs good torque but maximum power is not so important. So what we really need to look at is mechanical grip through the slow corners and also good traction out of them. The other thing we need to work hard on is the tyres: you have to look after them more in Hungary than at Monaco. But I am confident we will bring good tyres, and am happy with the choice that we have made.

Bob Bell, Technical Director

Q. Bob, Hungary has been earmarked as one of the circuits where the team expects to perform strongly: is that still the case?

BB:

Definitely, yes, and we are perhaps even more confident after our performance in Monaco. The circuit was very good to us last year, and our car this year is probably best relative to the competition on slower circuits where we can use maximum downforce, and which reward our good traction and braking. We will be hoping for a similar level to that we demonstrated last year although somehow, I doubt we will find ourselves lapping Michael Schumacher this time around.

Q. Tyre performance will be a critical parameter in Hungary: how confident are you in their performance?

BB:

We have made a sensible tyre choice following hot weather testing in Jerez prior to the German Grand Prix, and we have every confidence we can manage our tyres correctly during the event. Michelin looked very competitive in Germany, and we were able to make the most of what we had at our disposal. Of course, we do not yet know how the Bridgestones will perform, but with the testing ban currently in force, I expect the balance of power to remain relatively constant with what we have seen in recent races.

Q. Finally, we have reached two-thirds distance in the season, and Renault holds a nine point advantage over BAR in the constructors' championship. Are you pleased with that situation?

BB:

We are very pleased to have maintained our second position in the championship through the middle part of the season, and the gap has remained relatively constant since the early part of the year. Of course, our objective will be to capitalise on our stronger circuits to open up that gap, but we go into every race with the aim of maximising the finishing positions of both our drivers. It is vital to maintain that gap, as I firmly believe the chase for second in the championship will go right down to the last race. As we have seen over the past three rounds as the margin has see-sawed, this kind of gap is incredibly tenuous. We need to take every opportunity we can to score points with both cars.

Rob White, Engine Technical Director

Q. A final evolution of the B spec was introduced in Hockenheim, and there is a new spec in Hungary. How pleased are you with progress on the engine, and with its overall performance?

RW:

I am pleased with the progress made with the performance of the RS24 during the season, which is the result of a process that balances aggression and rigour, to advance the performance while managing the risks to maintain reliability, which is still the prerequisite for good racing results. While pleased with the performance, we are never satisfied so the whole Viry group will continue to strive to further improve the RS24 to power Fernando and Jarno through the final third of the season.

Q. Can you tell us a little more about the D spec?

RW:

The RS24D, racing in Hungary for the first time uses a revised cylinder head and related parts in the top end of the engine. The RS24D represents a small performance step over the final RS24B and will be the platform for further refinement and development during the final part of the season. There was an RS24C development project, which was pursued on the dyno, but which did not go in the car. Elements of the RS24C will appear in future versions of our engine.

Q. Does introducing a new engine spec during a testing ban pose any particular problems?

RW:

Although for base engine performance and reliability, it is the intention that track testing is confirmatory rather than exploratory, track testing remains an important final hurdle. It is also the first chance to gauge the subjective impressions of the drivers and an opportunity to work on the final calibration and set up of control systems. The timing of the test ban is known in advance, so must be considered in the planning and management of engine performance steps. Of course, the absence of track tests during August reduces the scope of changes that can introduced at races during and immediately after this period.

The Engineer's View with Pat Symonds

Hungary, along with Monaco, is generally recognised as one of the most difficult circuits to overtake on. History has shown this to be the case, but let's try and understand why it is so difficult to overtake on any circuit, and more specifically at the Hungaroring. Many people feel that because modern F1 cars are such sophisticated aerodynamic devices, and derive much of their performance from aerodynamics, overtaking will be difficult to achieve until there are limits in this area. Let's think about why aerodynamics make overtaking difficult.

In simple terms, the aerodynamic forces on the car are designed to increase the load on the tyres and therefore give them more grip. In doing this, they create a large turbulent area behind the car called the 'wake'. This is an area of disturbed air that is no longer travelling the expected direction and one can easily see this when watching the cars running in the wet. The large rooster tails generated behind the cars are indicative of the wake area but in reality, as water is much heavier than air, the wake is vastly larger than is seen by this phenomenon. Approximately speaking, the length of the wake is proportional to the square of the car's speed, whereas the total magnitude of it is proportional to the drag of the car. At high downforce circuits such as the Hungaroring, the drag - approximately one third of the downforce - is of course also high and hence the magnitude of the wake is even greater. Of course, this wake also includes a small low pressure pocket which, when a car is close enough to the one in front, allows it to slipstream and gain straight-line speed.

At the sort of maximum speed we see in Hungary, of just over 300 kph on the main straight, the length of this wake is approximately 150m, which is over 20% of the length of the straight. The wake from the leading car has two fundamental effects on the car following it. Firstly, as an aid to overtaking, it reduces the drag of the following car and at extremely small distances, when one car is tucked right behind the leading car, the drag reduction is very large, bringing a gain in straight-line speed. Unfortunately, when the following car is further back in the wake, its downforce is severely affected, not just in magnitude but also in its front-rear balance.

For example, if two cars are travelling at around 200kph, when the following car is ten car lengths from the one in front, it will experience a downforce reduction of around 20% and the balance will shift about 4% to the rear. This alone makes it difficult for the driver of the following car, because not only does he lose grip but the car also understeers a lot. As it gets closer to the car in front, things get even worse. At three car lengths' distance, the following car may have lost one third of its downforce and be experiencing an aero balance shift of over 15%. This makes it virtually impossible for the following driver to stay close to the car in front through any reasonably quick corner leading onto a straight, and if he can't stay close on the corner leading to the straight, then it is very difficult to use any speed advantage for anything other than catching up, rather than actually overtaking.

Of course, if the cars had extremely limited aerodynamics, then this wake would be very small, but will never be non-existent: any body moving through the air will always generate some wake, no matter how streamlined it is, and in other formulae, one can see even touring cars slip-streaming each other.

There are other factors which will either directly or indirectly affect the likelihood of overtaking in an F1 race. Some of these are contradictory. For example, if we increased the grip of the car to the road, perhaps by having larger tyres, then teams would tend to reduce the downforce as the optimisation of the total package would move in this direction: corner speeds would be maintained, and thus it would be possible to increased top speed by removing downforce. This of course would reduce the wake, and may make overtaking easier. Conversely, it could be agreed that if we were able to reduce the grip in slower corners, by alterations to the tarmac, and yet keep grip high in faster corners by banking them, then some of these faster corners could be taken flat out which would have the effect of joining two straights and making the straights longer. Of course, this would be a radical proposal for the circuit owners and require much research to get the numbers right, but circuit design undoubtedly does affect overtaking, and the general premise of a slow corner followed by a long straight and another slow corner is conducive to overtaking by F1 cars, in their current configuration.

Having said that, even this type of circuit configuration cannot be taken as a sure-fire guarantee of exciting racing. The 'new' Hockenheim uses such a layout and although we had a very exciting race there three weeks ago, if we look at previous years, we saw just three competitive overtaking manoeuvres all race in 2003, while in 2002 the only overtaking came about as a result of teams making incorrect tyre choices: Barrichello, for example, spent 47 laps (two race stints) stuck behind a competitor during this race. So, even this kind of 'formula' for circuit design can produce poor racing. Equally, if we consider the British Grand Prix in 2003, it produced a fantastic race with a great deal of overtaking on a circuit that does not follow what has become the accepted layout, whereas 2004 produced a much more "normal" race. Circuit design is important, but there is no single effective formula for entertaining racing.

These facts may lead us to draw a more relevant conclusion. Essentially, if cars are of similar, consistent performance and leave the grid together, there is no real reason to believe they will ever overtake each other. Similarly, if their performance is vastly different, and they are pre-sorted by speed, then the leading, faster cars will simply pull away. If we believe overtaking is important, then what we need to do is devise a method whereby the cars will have different levels of performance, at different stages of the race. This sometimes occurs if people use different types of tyres, which have different performance profiles through a race. It has also been employed in some form with turbocharged engines, where a limited number of over-boosts are allowed in a race. But overall, it is this concept of a variable performance differential between the cars that is central to generating overtaking during a race.

The Engineer's View with Denis Chevrier

Historically, Hungary has been characterised by its sporting aspects rather than its technical demands. It is a circuit at which overtaking is notoriously difficult, and modifications to the layout last year have not significantly changed this situation. While not as important as in Monaco, pole position still represents a major advantage.

With a layout that includes 16 corners in just over four kilometres, this is a circuit where a low percentage of the lap (51%) is spent at full throttle, and where the maximum speed is also relatively low, at just over 300 kph. Five of these corners are taken at less than 100 kph, and just two see speeds of more than 200 kph. However, the other interesting factor is that unlike in Monaco, there are no what might be termed unusually slow corners, and the slowest turn is the first corner, taken at 90 kph.

Consequently, the range of engine performance is not as wide as at some other circuits, and during the race weekend we concentrate on optimising acceleration between 90 kph and 250 kph. We have made significant progress with in-gear performance during the season, and this will allow us to capitalise on the generous torque curve of the RS24.

The circuit is also renowned for a very dusty atmosphere. However, this does not give us any major problems as the density of this air-borne pollution is not particularly high, and not significantly different from other circuits during the season. One other factor to bear in mind is the comparatively high weight penalty for carrying a heavy fuel load at this circuit (0.41s per 10kg). This means that an engine with good fuel consumption will provide a greater relative advantage than at some other venues.

Finally, the other factor to be taken into account is the ambient temperature. Of course, this requires special precautions in terms of cooling, but we are familiar with these demands. Rather, high temperatures also have the effect of dislocating an engine's power curve upwards, meaning peak power is produced at higher engine speeds than usual, owing to acoustic changes produced by the lower air density. In this respect, the new D-spec engine which will debut at this race will improve the engine power available throughout the rev range as well as allowing us to run higher engine speeds, and will provide an additional advantage in these circumstances.