Bahrain Tech updates

The 2nd race of the season often sees teams bring a variety of Bahrain tech updates. As well as accumulating data from pre-season testing, the teams now have 10 terabytes of race data where the car has been pushed to the limit for the first time. This data is not only used by the engineers and designers to understand the behaviour of their car throughout a race, but also to help correlate the teams various models and simulation tools, improving their accuracy.

The desert heat of the Bahrain Grand Prix causes track temperatures to reach highs of 43°C, as seen in FP1 (the hottest session of the weekend). Therefore, teams have added a variety of vents on the bodywork to increase cooling, which is particularly important as this year’s grid features tightly packaged cooling layouts. The brakes are also a major consideration, scoring 9 out of 10 in terms of the severity of brake demand, with only Montreal, Mexico City, Abu Dhabi and Singapore ranking higher, according to Brembo. This means the pads, discs and calipers will reach extreme temperatures, which has led Brembo to increase the number of ventilation holes in the discs as well as develop new calipers.

As shown above, one of the ways of measuring the surface temperature of a component is through the use of temperature strips. Here, each strip is a different scale, with ‘A’ ranging from 37°C – 65°C and ‘B’ ranging from 71°C – 110°C. Here, we can see that the temperature closer to the exhaust is around 57°C but where the hot exhaust contacts the surface further backwards, the temperature reaches around 80°C. These images were taken on the Thursday before the Bahrain Grand Prix so could these strips be left over from the Australian Grand Prix?