Drenched in champagne and clutching a trophy, it’s often the case that an F1 race winner will refer not to how good his race was but rather to how well the practice went.
However good the car or skilled the driver, without the right level of preparation, it very rarely goes well.
In F1, rules limit the amount of track practice and computer time spent doing aerodynamic modeling.
Concurrently, F1 drivers under contract have been increasingly limited in what they are allowed to drive outside of their F1 obligations, mostly for safety reasons.
The practice got reduced after 1986 when Elio Deangelis got killed because of a lack of marshalls and medical staff at Paul Ricard during private testing.
All practice subsequently needs to have full track staffing and help.
Drivers rely a lot on simulators these days to “practice.” As a result, every team has set up an advanced sim-racing system at its facility to be used by all of its drivers.
How often they practice on the simulation system depends on each team.
There are also restrictions on how much the cars can be run. It used to be that teams would have private test sessions on tracks they rented privately or owned (Ferrari).
Without further ado, in this article, we’ll explain exactly how and how much F1 drivers practice. Shall we?
How Do F1 Drivers Practice on Track? How Much?
Grand Prix weekend programs four hours of practice in the ordinary course of events.
There are two 90-minute sessions – free practice one and free practice two – on a Friday (Thursday in Monaco), and a final hour – free practice three – on Saturday.
The timings are variable but related. Usually, there are:
- The two-and-a-half-hour gap between the end of FP1 and the start of FP2
- The two-hour gap between the end of FP3 and Qualifying.
FP2 is scheduled to begin at the same time of day as the Qualifying session and the race.
It’s a perennial problem for F1 that often, there are periods of the practice sessions when the track is eerily silent, with everyone simply sitting in their garages.
Given that F1 teams constantly bang on about the value of track time, it may seem strange that, given the opportunity, they don’t maximize their time on the track.
But there are other factors at play, with teams limited by their supply of tires, wear and tear on their engines, and the ambient conditions in which they operate.
Engine Problem
Engines require the simplest explanation. Each car is limited to three engines, three turbochargers, three MGU-Hs, two battery packs, two control electronics, and two MGU-Ks.
The higher the mileage those units accrue, the greater the chance of failure and either grid-place penalties or, in the worst-case scenarios, a failure to finish a race.
It isn’t an exact science, but each component has a predicted lifespan beyond which the risk of failure increases exponentially.
Blasting around the track and racking up 300km in each practice session would exceed the safe limit by a considerable margin.
Tires Also Limit the Amount of Track Practice
The second factor to consider is tires. Each car has 13 sets of dry tires for the weekend.
They are allocated two mandatory race sets, one set of the softest compound that cannot be used before Q3, and a free choice of the other ten sets.
Gradually, throughout the practice session, the number of tire sets is whittled down, with teams having to ‘return’ sets to Pirelli (though in practice, they simply electronically delete them from their allocation).
With caveats for weather and other calamities, they are required to return one set after 40 minutes of FP1 and another at the end of FP1. Two more sets are returned after FP2 and a final two after FP3.
Nothing prevents a driver from using all 13 sets of tires during practice. Still, the standard methodology is for the driver to use only the six sets they have to discard, keeping the other seven sets in pristine condition for Qualifying and the Grand Prix.
The teams are therefore limited to doing the laps their practice tires can usefully deliver.
That one set of tires has to be returned after 40 minutes of the first session (these are known colloquially as the FP140 tires) ties into the third reason teams aren’t running from green light to chequered flag in the practice sessions.
Free Practice 1 (FP1) – Overview
Every team will do its own thing during the practice sessions, but most follow a similar pattern.
FP1 – when the track is at its least representative – is usually given over to aerodynamic testing, trialing new parts, and working on the general balance of the car.
Since every session is vital, it’s reasonable to say that FP1 is the least critical of the three – that’s why teams sometimes bench a race driver and let one of the youngsters have a go.
Following the winter testing program (six days this year), teams aren’t allowed to go testing with their current cars, so any tests they need to perform must be conducted over the race weekend during the practice sessions.
During FP1, you will see cars decorated with grids of pressure taps hanging off the cars at awkward angles to test airflow.
There will also be ‘flo-vis’ paint: a thin, luminous oil sprayed on the bodywork and then photographed when the car returns to the garage to demonstrate the quick-and-dirty version of the same thing.
This might be used to study just the current bodywork, but teams will often be swapping existing and experimental parts in FP1 and gathering comparison data.
This is another reason cars may spend extended periods in the garage: while a front wing can be changed in five seconds, a more complex alteration, such as fitting a different floor, or rear wing, may take half an hour.
Much of the work above is looking at the long-term rather than the immediate needs of this particular weekend – but, alongside the aero testing, teams will also be using FP1 to ‘dial in’ their setup.
They will have arrived at the circuit with a ‘baseline’ setup derived from historical data and more recent work in the simulator, but this will always need to be at least fine-tuned.
Free Practice 2 (FP2) – Overview
While FP1 is primarily given over to development, FP2 focuses much more on race preparation.
The gap between the two Friday sessions is euphemistically referred to as the ‘lunch break,’ but at best, there may be time to scoff a sandwich.
It’s a busy period, with a debriefing session for the engineers, while mechanics are buried in inspections and larger-scale set-up changes.
Once FP2 gets underway, the teams want to optimize the car for Qualifying and the race.
The value of FP2 at the same time of day as the race and Qualifying is that it’s likely to occur in similar ambient conditions.
The behavior of the tires changes according to the temperature of the track, and so the best chance of replicating race and Qualifying conditions exists – all things being equal – during FP2.
The typical pattern for FP2 is for a team to practice with the two compounds they plan to use during the race.
They will start the session with a short-ish run, or two, on the harder of these compounds, before switching to the softest compound for a short run to simulate a Qualifying lap.
The second half of the session is largely given over to ‘high-fuel’ running. Having operated the car with a light fuel load, they will now fill it up and see how it performs when lugging around an extra 100kg.
The high-fuel run simulates what the cars will experience in the race’s first half. It might be anything up to six seconds slower than a quali-sim at the start of the run, with the lap times decreasing as the fuel burns off.
Free Practice 3 (FP3) – Overview
There’s a great deal of activity between FP2 and FP3. A vast amount of data is sifted overnight, both at the track and back at base, while in the garage, the cars are stripped, rebuilt, and have their race gearboxes installed.
- A gearbox has to last six events – but it doesn’t have to be used in the practice sessions, so to avoid wear and tear on the race box, a spare tends to be used on a Friday.
- The other thing the crews do is remove all of the testing-specific kits. The car will be fitted with extra sensors and cameras during the first day, and those have to come off.
- The wiring loom will also be swapped. There might be 5kg of extra cabling and connectors on the car to accommodate all of those extra sensors, which is surplus to requirement when the car is getting down to its race weight.
FP3 is generally used for confirmation of decisions made based on Friday running. So the team will have a good idea now of how they want to run the car at the sharp end of the weekend and use this session to make sure they’ve got those decisions right.
The session will likely include a few short runs to validate the set-up on a favored race tire, followed by another Qualifying simulation to end the session.
Once that’s completed, the cars return to the garage for inspections, the drivers and engineers disappear for another debriefing session, and the next time the vehicle leaves the garage, it will attempt to Qualify for the Grand Prix.
Practicing with Simulation Tools
Formula 1 cars are the most complex automobiles worldwide, but their testing on the racetrack and in the wind tunnel is extremely limited.
There are only six days of winter testing before the season starts and only four hours of practice each race weekend.
That’s why Formula 1 teams rely more than ever on collecting data in the virtual world – much of it is done through simulations.
This area is even more crucial from the 2020 season, as many new tracks are on the racing calendar.
Formula 1 teams use different simulation areas to train for a Grand Prix, but the two most important are the “driver-in-loop” simulator and computer simulations.
The “Driver-in-Loop” Simulator (DiL)
This virtual test track recreates the car and the circuits in incredible detail to further develop the car, find the right setup, and help the drivers find their way around a route in a virtual environment.
In this context, Mercedes, for example, uses a custom-made simulator system in the factory.
The DiL is comparable to a professional flight simulator used to train pilots. The big difference is that the “cockpit” looks like a Formula 1 car.
In a typical DiL session, the racers and simulator drivers easily cover more than a full race distance.
Thousands of computer simulations are completed simultaneously since computer-simulated laps can be carried out 100% virtually.
This allows them to be accelerated and run parallel with other simulations to support vehicle dynamics and strategy classes.
These virtual tools are critical for a team, mainly if they’ve never driven on a circuit.
How Accurate is the “Driver-in-Loop” Simulator?
The track models used are incredibly detailed. They are created using lidar scans, which use laser images to create a 3D map of the entire track and its characteristics – from track surface to curbs and surroundings.
Teams are also working with gaming companies to reproduce the track environment as realistically as possible, as visual cues are important for drivers to identify braking and turn-in points.
The market for those extremely complex track prototypes is tiny, so the simulations of several teams are based on the same track data and information.
The simulator is built to be as realistic as possible – using the same chassis, pedals, steering wheel, and cockpit as in the actual car.
Drivers often sit in the simulator in full racing gear for a fully immersive experience.
A lot of time is spent comparing the virtual car model with the real car so that it behaves in the simulator precisely as it does on the real track.
This way, they can play through the same setup settings and changes in the simulator as they would on the actual track and see how the balance or performance changes.
Computer Simulations – What Do They Do?
In addition to the DiL program, there is another virtual test track, which, however, exists entirely in computer software.
A file with the ideal line is generated from the DiL, which is then used for hundreds of thousands of virtual laps before each event and produces terabytes of data.
Engineers can speed up those software simulations and run those in parallel – this allows enormous amounts of information to be gathered quickly.
Looking at the car’s dynamics, the engineers focused fully on the details in terms of information on particular parts and how the vehicle reacts to minimal setup changes.
A huge number of setup options are run through in the simulations, and the data output (often in the form of graphs) can be compared not only with the other computer experiments but also with the DiL data or information from the real car and be superimposed.
Once the data has been analyzed, the team decides which direction the setup should take for Friday practice. This is used as the basis for the further development of the car on the track.
