Chapter 379: 2021 Bahrain Grand Prix | Friday | FP2 + Simulator

"Okay, time to go," Fatih said, stretching himself the moment the final car returned to the pit, not planning on staying any longer."Five minutes," Alex said as he walked out of the house. Fatih turned to his grandmother, who had already fallen asleep, and picked up the neatly placed cover from the sofa before covering her. He finally headed up to his room to pick up his bag before he left the house, getting into the car where Alex was already waiting, and a few seconds later, they were heading to Milton Keynes.

He wasn’t that worried about the performance they had shown in FP1, which at the end of it, due to Gasly failing to improve, had them in P9 and P13 respectively, because he already knew that the car was capable of more than this.

As Alex focused on driving, he, on the other hand, removed the tablet from his bag and started going through the telemetry from both Gasly and Yuki, making sure he fully understood how differently each of them drove the car so that he could emulate it in the simulator during the setup changes they would be trying and see how each driver’s style performed.

He had no intention of driving it the way he liked or setting up the car the way he knew was the fastest because of how unstable it was with that setup. He knew it would be a nightmare for the two drivers to handle for different reasons. Gasly couldn’t deal with it since it was similar to the situation he had faced at Red Bull, while Yuki couldn’t handle it because he had no experience driving with that setup. It was also going to be his first time in the car, making the setup one not recommended for a rookie when it was difficult for even veterans to drive at its limit.

The drive lasted about two hours, and by the time they arrived, FP2 had already started. It was the most important of today’s free practice sessions because it was taking place within the same time and conditions as tomorrow’s qualifying, so having pace in this session was nothing but positive news regarding the level of performance they would have in qualifying.

They spent ten minutes with the simulator engineers before he immediately replaced the driver in the simulator and got to work.

The first ten minutes were for Fatih to warm up before he finally started doing push laps without needing to do correlation runs, since the human-out-of-the-loop simulation had already proven that the real-world drive and the simulation were very close when Gasly’s telemetry was mirrored by the machine and resulted in a close lap time to the real world.

Within just two laps, with his tires getting into the optimal window at the start of the lap without a warm-up, Fatih was already getting close to Gasly’s time as he improved on each sector every time he passed it the second time.

.....

"It doesn’t get old, no matter how many times I see this," Kendrick, the Simulation Performance Engineer for the session, said as he watched Fatih take only half an hour to match what Gasly was doing on the track before pushing beyond it, improving lap after lap and widening the gap.

"How is he dealing with the twitches from the car in the second sector?" Aubrey, the Simulation Software Engineer, asked as he turned to the session leader.

Kendrick didn’t respond for a moment as he clicked a few things in Fatih’s telemetry before he said with surprise in his tone, "He is counter-steering before the slides become problematic, as if he is predicting them." He saw the difference between Fatih’s steering and the top-down angle showing the virtual car’s racing line, which didn’t have any of the expected twitchy line that could be imagined based on Fatih’s steering.

Although he was surprised, it was not due to the impossibility of the action, but because he was seeing it for the second time while on this team, but it was being done very differently. Despite knowing that, he still couldn’t pinpoint the exact reason he felt they were different, so he set it aside to check later.

However, they had to stop for a moment because the second free practice was finished, and they needed to attend the post-session debriefing to hear about all the conditions the drivers faced so that they could take that into consideration.

They were transitioning from using the same setup as the drivers to now trying to find the optimum setup using all the data gathered over the two sessions and have it ready before tomorrow’s FP3 session so that they could implement it before it started.

Fatih and the engineers in the simulation department moved to the meeting room, put on their headphones, and tuned in to the post-session debriefing, which started a few minutes after the drivers finally arrived.

What they said was only similar in a few areas compared to what they had said in FP1, showing that the car was improving. But something had remained the same despite making slight setup changes: the car was still feeling twitchy in sector two, mostly at T9 and T10, where most of the time is gained and lost due to how technical it was.

Fatih and the simulation engineers listened carefully, taking notes of everything. Once the briefing session ended, they didn’t leave, as they started poring through the mountain of data collected in the second FP session. Only an hour later did they finally return to the simulator and start getting to work on what was guaranteed to be no less than a five-hour simulator session.

It was this time Fatih saw how an experienced team runs, because for every ten laps he completed, they were changing to the next setup, poring through twenty different ones before he finally started cherry-picking which parts of which setup run should be added. One after another, some combinations worked very well and were kept, while some worked so horribly that it killed the car’s entire balance, so they were removed.

Finally, at the seventh hour, they had a breakthrough that, at least in the simulator, seemed to have dealt with most of the complaints the drivers had while also showing to be a definitive improvement on lap time compared to the previous setup.

After a few tweaks, the final optimized setup was sent directly to Bahrain. Now it was time for them to implement it and see the result of their more than seven hours of hard work.

Fatih, who was now done with his tasks, finally headed to the sleeping quarters and immediately went to sleep. At least, that is what everyone who was with him thought, but the moment he was on the bed, he immediately entered the simulation and applied the setup to his car to test it.