Why F1 energy management changes could redefine Miami GP practice priorities

With energy harvesting and management tweaks under discussion between the power unit manufacturers, teams, and FIA, the Miami GP could “shift priorities” for teams in practice.

Discussions between the FIA and FOM with the teams and power unit manufacturers are underway ahead of the Miami Grand Prix, with the most likely option for change coming by way of energy harvesting tweaks.

Miami practice priorities change as energy management changes loom

Want more PlanetF1.com coverage? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for news you can trust.

Two of the three technical meetings scheduled between the relevant parties have already been held, while a third meeting is scheduled for the 20th of April at which it’s expected decisions will be made, via voting, to tweak the energy management regulations in a bid to create a more natural driving dynamic.

With the general feeling being that the new regulations have plenty of potential to deliver a strong racing product, the anticipation is that there won’t be any wholesale changes; certainly, nothing as drastic as a change in ratio between the internal combustion engine [ICE] and the electrical output of the power unit.

Instead, tweaks and modifications are the likely course of action, and it’s understood that the leading solution is to change the maximum harvestable energy from circuit to circuit.

As it stands, the regulations allow for 8.5 megajoules of energy to be harvested back into the 4mJ battery over the course of a lap, with this energy deployable as a 350kW boost to the power output from the ICE.

However, in order to maximise this harvesting, it has resulted in unusual driving techniques such as excessive lift-and-coast, downshifting along straights, and a general passivity in corner approach in order to ensure energy is optimal for straight-line deployment.

This has led to widespread criticisms from the drivers and, in a bid to explore tweaks, the maximum harvestable figure was reduced to 8.0mJ at Suzuka. It’s anticipated that this number could be reduced significantly, depending on circuit characteristics, perhaps as low as 5.0 or 6.0mJ in a bid to further improve the situation without having too much of a detrimental impact on overall laptime.

With no testing possible in order to evaluate how these changes might affect performance and the setup considerations for the cars, the first opportunity any team will have to refine any tweaks made will be during the first practice in Miami.

Assuming changes are made to the energy regulations, it means that the priorities for the one and only practice session in Miami could be quite different to normal, as Haas‘ Hoagy Nidd explained to select media, including PlanetF1.com, this week.

“Obviously, with the changes to the energy management, that’s something that is more managed by our power unit partners, and they will come up with a strategy based upon that,” said the team’s head of car engineering.

“They’ll obviously have to introduce their software changes. I think that some of the required submission dates for software before the event have been delayed a little bit, which will help all of the power unit manufacturers in order to get code written and deployed, and then have a chance to actually test it.

“So, once it gets through that phase, it will then come to us.

“In terms of extra work we need to do, we need to dedicate a bit more time to understanding what the changes mean, and then how that will affect our vehicle performance, and where we need to target in order to do that.

“So yeah, it’s not massive, but it does shift the priority slightly; once we get to the event, you’ll probably see teams doing slightly different things in that P1 session than they would normally do.

“Normally, in a P1, you go out, you try and get the car as sorted as you can within those first couple of runs, but you’re dedicated to looking at things like tyres, some basic setup changes, things like that.

“As well as that, in parallel, we’re going to have to go out and actually test the software and try and get through some of the different parts of the strategy during P1, whether that’s testing boost, whether it’s trying to look at the overtake, or whether it’s making sure the launch is okay. There would definitely be some shifts in priorities, probably across the whole grid.”

With the assumption being that this maximum harvestable energy figure is the most likely course of action, Nidd explained just what a difference that makes in terms of how a driver attacks a lap, revealing how it reduces the requirement for unusual driving techniques.

“In terms of driving more naturally, I’m not sure that the reduction in the recharge overall limit massively affects that, but what it obviously does do is reduce the amount you recover, reduce the amount that you deploy,” he said.

“What it means is that you can recover a greater proportion of what you need to do whilst under braking conditions or under power throttle conditions on corner exit, normal sort of grip-limited areas of the circuit.

“That means that, if you achieve your energy target under, how do I say, more normal driving conditions, you don’t need to start altering your behaviour in order to make the final mega joule of energy there.

“So you don’t need to start having lift and coast. You don’t need to start using super clipping; you don’t need to have the drivers holding part-throttle on exit of corners to avoid deploying in one place and putting it somewhere else.

“In a way, it’s kind of introducing more of a problem to fix another problem, and maybe not ideal, but it’s probably where we are with this current hardware, across the whole grid.”

With Haas being a customer team for the Ferrari power unit supply, the American squad’s relationship with the Italian manufacturer means that a customer will never be a “main priority” for the power unit side of the business, with that focus instead being on the factory team.

It’s for that reason that Haas, like all customer teams, is left somewhat behind in the initial stages of understanding.

“That’s an interesting one, and quite pertinent to the coming few weeks, obviously, with the meetings that are going on this week,” he said, when asked by PlanetF1.com about how the impact for a customer team can differ from a manufacturer.

“Obviously, as a customer team, you are always the recipient of that,” he said.

“Previously in my career, I’d been in the works teams. I was in Mercedes for 11 years. I was in Ferrari, and I was on the power unit side there.

“Of course, the nature of being a customer team is you have to get what you’re given, and there’s an element of us being able to feed back, but we will never be the main priority; that’s just the reality of being a customer team.

“We have an opportunity with our power unit partners to work pretty well. It’s one of the better relationships I’ve ever seen in Formula 1.

“But, at the end of the day, you’ve got to know that you will have to race what you’re given. And with the additional complexity of the energy management this year, in the early parts of the year, I think we’ve seen other customer teams in Formula 1 say that they may have felt like they end up with the performance you’re given on the car.

“It’s difficult to move too far outside of that, because we don’t have all of the facts and figures, and the full understanding of how the software exactly is going to work.

“We haven’t really got heavily involved in that, other than the discussions around preparing what’s going to be said in the meetings that have been going on this week.

“We obviously have quite a close working relationship with Ferrari on that as well, so we have to make sure that what we want aligns with what they want.

“That’s really how we’ve worked on that, but that’s more of an ongoing thing; that stuff just goes on throughout the year and all of the time.

“That hasn’t been something we’ve pushed on from the factory here at home in this period, particularly hard.”

Want to be the first to know exclusive information from the F1 paddock? Join our broadcast channel on WhatsApp to get the scoop on the latest developments from our team of accredited journalists.

You can also subscribe to the PlanetF1 YouTube channel for exclusive features, hear from our paddock journalists with stories from the heart of Formula 1 and much more!

Read Next: Oliver Bearman points finger at Franco Colapinto over ‘unacceptable’ move