Reflecting on his return to Racing Bulls, Liam Lawson denies that his confidence took any knocks after his two Formula 1 races with Red Bull, and contends that he hadn't driven enough to determine if he was truly struggling.
The Kiwi reunited with the Italian squad after just a brace of grand prix weekends with the lead Red Bull team, where his results and gap to Max Verstappen were considered enough for Christian Horner and Helmut Marko to drop him in favour of Yuki Tsunoda.
Lawson had struggled with limited running in Red Bull's RB21, having faced a water pressure issue in testing, a turbocharger problem in Australia's FP3 session, and was then thrust straight into action with one practice session in China. The New Zealander thus qualified 18th and 20th for his two grands prix for the team, 20th for the China sprint race, and also crashed out in the Albert Park season opener.
Asked if he was rebuilding his confidence after a bruising sojourn with Red Bull, Lawson asserted that it never needed to be restored in the first place; instead, his focus was simply on getting to grips with a new car – the VCARB 02 – with limited running.
"Honestly, confidence-wise, nothing really changed from the start of the year," Lawson declared. "I didn't spend anywhere near enough time [in the Red Bull] for me to reflect on those two races and go, 'oh my god, I've really struggled in this car, I've lost my ability'.
"It wasn't really like that. I did two races that were two very messy weekends from a lot of factors, but I think confidence-wise that didn't really change.
"It's just been about getting used to a new car again, and the team, and trying to do all that as quickly as possible. I think that's really been where the focus is at. Confidence-wise I feel, honestly, as I always have."
Lawson also opened up on the difficulty of starting on the front foot across the practice sessions and going into a race, with his own feeling being that the variety of conditions at the opening races has made it difficult to get a good balance with the tyres.
He says that many of the variables involved are not easily replicable in the simulator, ensuring that the teams have had their work cut out in determining how best to use the tyres on a preparation lap.
"To be honest, it feels like a little bit of a tricky year with tyres, with set-up," he explained. "I think warm-up, we've had very different conditions.
"We went from Japan being very cold to Bahrain being very hot and when you're trying to build the tyre up in the perfect way, that's a completely unique thing to work on, and you can't really simulate that in a simulator.
"You're faced with a lot more real-life conditions that you're not going to simulate, and I think this year that stuff that we maybe don't simulate has been more of a challenge than in past years.
"The car set-up itself, we can simulate that and I think we have that in a pretty good place, but it's really that other stuff that you can't actually really work on that can be quite difficult."
Autosport says: Why is it difficult to simulate varying conditions?
Simulators are, effectively, virtual manifestations of the data collected from the real world. Think of it as a less advanced version of The Matrix; you have reams of mathematical formulae, variables, and subsequent calculations using those variables and formulae to produce a representation of a tyre, or a piston, or a tiny aero device.
Tyre models are one of the most difficult things to produce for a racing team, simply because a) the tyre constructions are changing slightly every year, and b) tyres change elastically, plastically, and chemically all at the same time. Defining that as a model and then extrapolating that into different use cases is hard, and often continuous, work.
Degradation is not linear, and tyres also do not respond the same across temperatures. If you have real world data for a tyre operating with, say, 22C air temperature and 35C track temperature and find it holds up well and degrades at a certain rate, one might expect 23C air temp, or 36C track temperature, to change slightly. In reality, that single degree change in ambient conditions can vastly change the window.
Since the C2s and C3s were new constructions for this year, it's given the teams the challenge of having to find new data for them. No wonder it's tricky to predict the conditions, especially as we've had rain, sunshine, new track surfaces, 20-year-old track surfaces. There's little environmental things as well; although the simulator can deal with track roughnesses and loading through corners, you can't really do a lot with little gusts or inconsistencies around the track.
Without the ability to really simulate how the tyres are going to respond to different use cases, there's still an element of finger-in-the-air estimations with tyre work. And that's how it should be - nobody wants everything to be fully simulated pre-weekend, otherwise you might as well just run the races on a supercomputer and save everyone the air miles...
