How hard is it to prepare the engines for two back to back races?
Mechanically there is little difference as the preparations we do for races are exactly the same. But for the people concerned it’s quite tough as there is a very concentrated amount of work in two weeks. We go to the first event with the engines prepared for round one, and during that event we keep a close eye on preparations for the second. This means that you are almost covering two Grands Prix at once! Obviously there are also fewer days between races so the work that would normally be carried out at the factory, such as simulations, reports, meetings and so on, are completed in five days fewer than normal.
Will you be re-using the engines from Australia?
Yes, we will be using the same engines in both Kimi’s and Romain’s cars. Unfortunately Romain’s engine didn’t get too many miles… As a general rule of thumb, to balance mileage across the eight engines permitted per driver over the whole season, each RS27 engine will complete either three Saturdays and Sundays or two whole weekends from Friday to Sunday. At the start of the season we prefer to use the unit for two whole weekends so we can push its mileage as far as possible and have some extra margin at the end of the season.
How do the challenges for the RS27 differ at Sepang from Albert Park?
Sepang has some more mid to high speed corners than Melbourne and that’s where we will need to concentrate our driveability efforts. The weather forecast here makes this track easier for the engine as the oxygen content in the air is balanced out by the water content, meaning there is less pressure on the pistons during combustion. People usually think engines will struggle with high temperatures, but actually we have the same engine temperatures as Melbourne as we can increase the amount of air flowing through the radiators. This means we can have all the systems working in optimal temperature range.
What preparation do you do on a Thursday to the RS27?
We actually started the preparation for this race last Sunday when we checked the Melbourne data to see how we could improve performance or reliability aspects. Today we put all these findings and changes (new parts, new maps, new procedures, etc.) back into the car and checked all behaved as expected during a long and complete fire-up procedure.
What are your expectations from this weekend after the encouraging start in Melbourne?
To be honest I think that we can have a good result here! Romain knows this track very well and loves racing here – it was his most impressive performance in GP2. Kimi also scored his first F1 race victory here in 2003 and won again in 2008, so it’s looking good! We will see when we get out on track, but fingers crossed the overall form from Australia will carry over to Malaysia.