Mark Hughes: Super-smooth Madrid circuit is an F1 minefield

The all-new Madring this weekend is sure to throw up some interesting challenges and unforeseen problems.

Featuring a super-smooth surface, an interesting layout with a long, banked Turn 12, the walls up hazardously tight at a chicane with a tightening exit and a series of long, interconnected bends, it has the potential to accentuate the different traits of the leading cars.

Turn 12 (aka The Monumental) may turn out to be critical in the shaping of the competitive order. Such a long, banked corner places a lot of vertical load on the outside tyres, as well as the sustained lateral load. This will tend to overheat the outside edge of the tyre and teams are expected to alter the rear camber angle so as to spread the load across the tyre’s tread surface more evenly through that turn. This means that for the rest of the lap the tyre will be running a camber angle which compromises grip, which will affect the temperature and, in turn, the performance degradation rate of the tyre. Any difference in tyre usage between the cars might be expected to be exaggerated.

The super-smooth surface will inevitably be very low grip, at least initially, but probably throughout the weekend. Without much surface irregularity for the tyre to bite into, its ‘mechanical’ grip – derived from how the tyre grabs the surface at the contact patch and the tyre bends around the load – will be low. The other grip mechanism – chemical grip – is about how the tyre interacts with the surface at a molecular level, but the Pirelli relies more on mechanical and relatively little on chemical grip.

Getting the tyre to work properly requires its core to be up to temperature so as to be elastic enough to bend around the grip generated by the tread surface. If the core remains cold and inelastic, the tread can overheat. A surface which is too hot and a core too cold potentially leaves you miles off the pace. Getting an equilibrium between the core and surface – getting the tyre to generate enough initial grip to begin to knead the core and bring it up to temperature – will be key.

Because of this, generating front tyre temperatures quickly enough could be tricky. We saw McLaren introduce some trick new front wheel rims at Zandvoort, designed to more effectively transfer brake heat into the rims and thereby the tyres. The pockets cast within the rims determine how much of the heat is retained – and on the evidence of a little moment in Monza Q3 they work extremely well. There, Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris went out together for the final Q3 runs – and Max Verstappen glued himself onto the tail of Norris as they left the pitlane, looking to benefit from the tow of the McLaren. Instead, what happened was that both McLarens were able to set an out-lap pace that Verstappen simply couldn’t live with. “I’m not going to be able to catch them,” he radioed in from Ascari, as they pulled out of his towing reach.