Chapter 382: 2021 Bahrain Grand Prix | Sunday | Race

With qualifying done and the cars officially entering Parc Fermé, which banned major setup changes, the team back at base immediately moved from car optimization to race execution and strategic scripting. With detailed tire data gathered since the winter testing period, Fatih immediately got back in the simulator to start driving long, multi-lap stints to see how the setup treats these tires on long runs and try to come up with the perfect window to pit. When that was completed, they immediately moved to undercut and overcut calculations, trying to calculate the exact gap needed to successfully pull off an undercut or an overcut.

While the human part of the simulation was doing that, in the background, their simulation systems were also running millions upon millions of simulations with specific situations being applied differently in every simulation: weather disruptions, safety cars, Virtual Safety Cars, accidents, damage to the car, punctures, and many more, all ensuring they had a coherent plan for every possible situation that might realistically happen on the track.

These automatic simulations went on overnight, even after the human simulation side of things came to a stop and the team went to rest, continuing all the way until just a few minutes before the pre-race briefing. All of the human and machine simulation results were then presented during the pre-race briefing.

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"Based on our pace, our race is with the Ferraris and McLaren, but a podium opportunity is still available in case of a reliability issue from the top four or a strategic blunder on their side. For Gasly, due to him managing to go through Q2 with mediums, his stint will be extended to between laps 14 and 25.

For Tsunoda, starting on softs, we will be looking to stop between laps 10 and 17 if the entire stint goes without a safety car. If we have one, we will be extending the stint, matching the laps spent behind the safety car, as long as the safety car happens between laps 1 and 9. If it happens after that, we will be pitting immediately for both drivers, so keep that in mind," Marco Perrone went through the strategy the team will be operating under.

"25? Are we sure we can go with the mediums to 25 laps? I’m pretty sure on our long run, 18 laps was the maximum stretch possible, so where did that number come from?" Gasly asked the moment Marco paused for a breather after finishing the opening part of the briefing.

As someone who had driven these cars, he knew exactly how long they could last, and the track at Bahrain was a monster when it came to tire degradation, virtually guaranteeing a two-stop race for everyone, barring specific circumstances.

So, if a driver managed to stretch the mediums to 25 laps, that would mean he could definitely take the hards for more than thirty laps and go for a one-stop race, gaining an entire pit-stop window of time by not having to pit for a second time like everybody else.

But he also knew how unlikely that was because although he, too, could stretch the tires to go for that long, it would require him to go excruciatingly slow and end up losing positions due to the pace deficit to not degrade the tires too much.

"I also don’t think the softs can go to lap seventeen; twelve is the maximum they can handle," Yuki also chimed in, as he wondered if the simulation program had a problem.

"I thought the same as well, but it is true," Marco said with a knowing look, as he knew exactly how unbelievable such results were in the first place. He paused for a moment, and when he saw they were listening clearly, he continued, "Fatih managed to extend the medium tires under a competitive pace up to 25 laps and do the same multiple times."

As he said that, he also clicked something on his computer, and it immediately showed the data across all the laptops of those in the briefing room and those at the home base attending the meeting. It showed the sector times across a 25-lap stint, and they were extremely close. After a few seconds, he moved to the next slide, showing the data from the soft run where he managed to extend the tires to lap 17.

"Are we sure there is no problem with the tire data used in the simulation?" Franz asked. Although he was seeing the data, he too was having difficulty believing that. After all, there were drivers known for their ability to nurse the tires and take them longer than expected, to the point they got the moniker "tire whisperer," but even those were yet to reach a level of extending the tires by that many laps at that pace. So everyone thought of the same possibility: a problem with the tire data in the simulation.

"I don’t believe that, as we repeated it a few times and even took the driving inputs from Fatih during the simulation and had the machine simulation replicate them to see if there was going to be a difference, but the results were within the same window. We had Albon get in the simulator following Fatih, but unfortunately, he couldn’t extend it to those numbers."

"What is he doing differently?" Gasly asked. When he heard that even Albon, who had already driven an F1 car for two seasons, couldn’t recreate what a yet-to-debut driver did, he knew if he could replicate it, it would give him an advantage and guarantee him a podium based on pace alone.

"We didn’t have enough time to fully break down how it is possible yet, but in the short time we had, we discovered that his consistency is out of this world. He managed to place the car on the same patch of tarmac on the straights every time, though the situation is different in the corners, as he kept changing his lines and where he was pushing with each lap.

This surprisingly distributed the stress across the tire and allowed for condition uniformity across the tire while keeping temperatures uniform and avoiding hotspots..." Marco started detailing the situation while also showing them the simulation laps from Fatih’s stints. The tire lines were being drawn from Fatih’s previous lap while showing the video of him driving the current lap. It then zoomed in on the tires in a corner, showing them flexing.

The feed changed to the same corner but on the next lap, showing the flexing was different, and then again on the next. It wasn’t until five laps later that the flexing resembled how it looked the first time. Then, to the surprise of everyone in the room, they watched Fatih repeat the same sequence, flexing the tires differently for five laps before repeating it again.

As they did that, everyone soon looked at one another, as they couldn’t really look at Fatih since he was attending the meeting from the home base, and there was no video feed, only a radio connection.

"These, along with his smooth inputs that reduce or nearly remove the tires from even microsliding, allowed him to extend the tires’ age to those extremities. Or at least, that is our hypothesis at the moment, and we will need to look into it further to weed out any possible chances of it being a bug in the simulation.

For a full guarantee, we will need to wait until Fatih can get into the current car to see if he can recreate it on an actual track," Marco added. He realized that everyone would now be talking about it while the drivers tried to replicate it, but unfortunately for them, they couldn’t do it today since they were going into a race, and practicing such a thing during an actual race was going to be impossible since they were fighting for as many points as possible.

"We will discuss more about it later. Let’s move to the next topic," Franz said, bringing everyone back to the main point of the gathering: the race briefing.