The thoughts of the entire Formula 1 world are still in Japan, trying to support Jules Bianchi in the hard battle that the young Frenchman is fighting. But the big Formula 1 family is arriving in Sochi for the only all-new event on the 2014 calendar, the Russian Grand Prix at Sochi, best known as the home of this year’s Winter Olympics.
“It’s always a challenge going to a new circuit and it’s easy to underestimate how much knowledge you take to an existing circuit because you’ve raced there beforehand,” says Scuderia Ferrari Technical Director James Allison. “Therefore going to a brand new one puts a team on its mettle to make sure they’ve covered all the bases. We know the basics about Sochi and we’ve had some opportunity to run it in both our off-line computer simulations and also with our driver simulator, to try and learn its characteristics.”
The aim of the simulations is to try and find a baseline set-up for the F14 T to start the weekend during Free Practice 1. A quick glance at the Sochi track map reveals two comparatively long fast sections and a number of corners at the low end of the speed range. “But the dominant corner is a really quite aggressively fast long flowing left-hander, shortly after the start-finish straight,” adds Allison. “So you can see just by a casual look that this is going to be a track where there is going to be a competition between what you want on the straights and what you want for that series of slow speed corners. The slow speed corners are going to be crying out for downforce, the straights, the opposite.” Apart from the set-up compromise driven by the track characteristics, there is also the compromise required between running maximum speed down the straights in the race, while having sufficient downforce to be quick through the corners during Saturday’s qualifying.


“Generally speaking, the more talented drivers, the ones who tend to have more spare mental capacity, start establishing competitive lap times earlier in the weekend than the others,” continues Allison. “But all the drivers in Formula 1 have got the talent to learn a track and be pretty much on the money by the time qualifying comes. So, the new track effect will only really persist for the first session or two.”
Formula 1’s tyre supplier has a difficult job, because choosing the right rubber for a brand new track is something that cannot really be sorted through simulation and Pirelli’s best assessment is that the Medium and Soft compounds are what is required. Another unknown quantity concerns the Power Unit requirements, particularly how to harvest and use the recovered energy and whether or not fuel saving strategies will be required. And then there’s always that most important factor to be considered, reliability. “We are in the final quarter of the season now and the reliability part of these 2014 rules will start to bear down ever more heavily on all the teams,” concludes the Scuderia’s Technical Director. “It’s a part of the rules that we need to take considerable care over to make sure we keep operating to our absolute best level.”