© Vladimir RysBulls' Guide To: Night RacingEverything is different when F1 goes racing after hours.
ThedefaultattitudewithinFormulaOnetoanythingnewisadeep-seatedandprofoundlevelofscepticism.Thus,whenF1announceditsnewstreetraceinSingaporewouldtakeplaceatnight,theconversationswithinthepaddockweremostlyaroundallthewaysitcouldgovery,verywrong.
Those doubts lasted until arriving in Singapore for the 2008 debut race but were dispelled for most people when they drove high over the start-finish straight on the East Coast Parkway, into the downtown core from Changi Airport, and saw 1,500 custom-made projectors, drawing 3,180,000 watts to light up the track like the proverbial Christmas tree. At that point night racing became the best idea ever.
Singapore In All Its Glory© Vladimir Rys
Seeing, it transpires, really was believing. There’s an obvious assumption that lighting a racetrack will be much the same as lighting any high-end sporting stadia – but it’s not the case. With the speeds at which F1 races, and the precision required to hit exacting braking points, something much brighter was required.
Singapore introduced new jargon into the F1 lexicon. Lumens (measuring the total quantity of visible light emitted over time) and Lux (Lumens per square meter) suddenly became talking points. Normal street lighting provides around 30lux and, in contrast, a football stadium might be illuminated to a value of 800lux. The Marina Bay Street Circuit illuminated its 6km of track, pit lane and runoffs to a value of 3000lux. That then became the standard for night racing.
This level of illumination is better than you’d get on an overcast day (1000-2000lux) but nothing close to what you would have in full sunlight, and that affects the tints the drivers use on their helmets.
When night races first appeared, drivers assumed they would need the sort of filters used for low-light conditions in other sports, and accordingly you would see the orange-tinted visors. That didn’t last particularly long once everyone become confident in the light level, and today drivers either go for clear visors, or a tint to deal with the glare from the light projectors.
On the subject of glare, another factor the drivers have to cope with in their selection of a visor tint is what to do in phases of a ‘night’ race where the sun is still on the horizon. Abu Dhabi, of course, is a day-night race, so driving with the sun at a low angle is part of the experience. It’s also happened a few times in Bahrain when the race has started a few minutes before sunset.
In reality, this isn’t a problem specific to night races: the Australian Grand Prix is a late afternoon race held at the very end of summer and the glare of a low sun in Albert Park has often been problematic for the drivers.
Alex's Visor In Singapore 2019© Vladimir Rys
In terms of operational requirements, racing at night doesn’t impose any restrictions on the team – but racing at night and practicing during the day does. The standard pattern for a race weekend is to have morning (FP1) and afternoon (FP2) free practice on a Friday, morning free practice (FP3) on a Saturday, followed by afternoon qualifying, and then a race on Sunday afternoon.
FP2 is usually timed to take place at the same time as qualifying and the race, and thus is most likely to be run in similar ambient conditions. This changes for a night race, where FP1 and FP3 shift to the afternoon and FP2 to the evening. Particularly at the desert races, this makes FP1 and FP3 largely redundant for set-up work, placing a much larger burden on the 90 minutes of FP2.
The issue is one of track temperature. The balance of the car is intimately linked to the temperature of the track. As a rule of thumb, a racing car heads more towards understeer – or more exaggerated understeer – as a track cools. A couple of degrees can make all the difference – but the difference between asphalt under the mid-day sun, and asphalt when the sun goes down can be more than a few degrees.
Taking last year’s Bahrain Grand Prix as an example, FP1 began at 2pm local when the track temperature was 50.6°C. For the start of FP2 at 6pm it had dropped to 31.4°C. That’s extreme – even by Bahrain standards, and the following day the drop-off between the start of FP3 and qualifying was ‘only’ 10.4°C – but that’s still enough to fundamentally alter the balance of the car.
So, what does a team do? One option is to simply ignore FP1 and FP3 and sit them out and save the engine – but in the modern era, with track time so very limited, no-one will want to spurn the opportunity to complete some running, particularly because you have to hand back the tyres whether you use them or not.
On Track In Abu Dhabi In 2019© Vladimir Rys
The sessions are still useful for general development work, not targeted specifically on the current race weekend but looking at new parts or developing an understanding of the car for the longer term. The team can also study its aerodynamic set-up as that isn’t particularly affected by the track temperature.
Beyond this, the team can get on with its normal set-up work with a suitable offset factored in – adjusting the setup to suit the grip. In a normal season, this would be easier to do in Abu Dhabi than it is in Bahrain, because at the start of the season, when the Bahrain Grand Prix is usually held, the car is new and less well understood than it will be at the season finale.
Using an offset is more problematic on Saturday than on Friday. In FP3, the race engineers would like to have their set-up dialled-in. FP2 should have provided a good indication of where they want to be and they don’t particularly like to be chasing track conditions on Saturday afternoon when they know those conditions aren’t going to last. The idea of making big changes in between final practice and qualifying isn’t something that they’re keen to do – particularly because they can’t make any further adjustments once qualifying begins as the cars are formally in parc fermé conditions.
On the other hand, they don’t want to give the drivers a poorly-handling car for FP3 because that saps confidence and nothing generates a better performance in qualifying than a confident competitor. It’s a difficult balancing act to which there isn’t particularly an answer.
Another temperature-related factor to consider during a night race is that the track doesn’t simply stop cooling once the lights go out. The surface will continue to give up its heat as the race progresses. Generally, this doesn’t happen for an early or mid-afternoon start, and races at those times of day usually have a fairly stable temperature regime.
At night – again, more so in the Gulf than in Singapore – the drop-off is pronounced. Whatever time of day, the car always handles differently towards the end of a grand prix than at the start, simply because it has shed 100kg of fuel – but the changing surface temperature at a night race adds another wrinkle to the calculations the race engineers and tyre specialists have to perform when deciding on set-up and strategy.
While the car is going to function differently during a night race, the team really doesn’t want the same thing to be true of the trackside crew or the drivers. Searching for that last tenth of performance applies just as much to the people as to the car, and as our understanding of race-going physiology has developed, so have our efforts to keep energy levels and attention spans high in the face of a quite severe disruption to circadian rhythms.
With a race team, this tends to be a pretty thankless task even for daylight races. The crew is regularly criss-crossing time zones; some days the sleep cycle involves an aircraft seat rather than a bed; other days the team plays one of its curfew jokers and works through the night to locate and/or fix a problem with one of the cars. Even without the joker, it’s common for the team to still be at the track approaching midnight on Thursday evening or 1am on Saturday morning – i.e. the time at which the curfew will begin before FP1 and FP3 for races at which those sessions begin at 1100 and 1200 respectively.
At a night race, those hours become more distorted. The later the race, the bigger the distortion. The Sporting Regulations stipulate (at the moment – but subject to change) a curfew beginning 11 hours before the start of a session, lasting eight hours. Last year in Singapore, FP3 was scheduled for an 6pm start, which meant the crews weren’t allowed back into the paddock until 3pm. If the previous day has ran well and the crew has finished work in the middle of the night, this leads to the very strange situation for our sporting director, having to sternly explain that he doesn’t want to see anyone sneaking off to bed until at least 7am.
The Crew In Bahrain 2019© Vladimir Rys
Even with that unusual instruction, there will always be those who awake by 9am, wandering the streets of Singapore and suffering for it later. It’s often more pronounced for the drivers than the crew, because the drivers tend to leave the track earlier and come in later.
The team does its best to limit the effect. The phrase that had the most currency in the early years of the Singapore Grand Prix was ‘staying on European time’, something achieved – with varying degrees of success – by the use of blackout blinds in hotel rooms and convincing those same hotels to run a breakfast service at around two in the afternoon. Diet certainly makes it easier to adapt to the one-off conditions, and at the track the team will serve lunch and dinner according to the race schedule rather than where the sun is in the sky. If that means dinner at 2am, so be it. For the drivers, their physios put a lot of thought into a diet designed to ensure maximum alertness and energy during the sessions on track.
Clearly, for a sport that traditionally has operated a daytime schedule, night races bring with them a set of new challenges. They also deliver various benefits. The original impetus for racing at night was an effort to appease the hugely influential European TV audience, who get the races in Singapore, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi at – more or less – the same time on a Sunday afternoon they would get the German, Italian and (likewise time-shifted) British Grands Prix.
It also provides a cooler – and thus more pleasant – environment for spectators. While the drop in temperature at Marina Bay isn’t so pronounced, escaping the mid-day furnace in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi is definitely a step in the right direction. Less tangible, but undeniably real, is the change in atmosphere. Whether you’re working in a garage or watching from a grandstand, everything becomes that little bit more vivid and exciting when the sun sets and F1 races under lights.
