Why F1 teams are racing into the unknown in China

Five years is an awful long time in Formula 1 and it feels even longer given the global pandemic that interrupted F1’s visits to Shanghai.

The last time F1 travelled to China, Max Verstappen had only won five races and RB was still racing as Toro Rosso rather than its previous name AlphaTauri.

In the meantime, as the Shanghai International Circuit hosted a makeshift COVID-19 hospital in 2022 rather than any major motor racing, F1 went through wide-ranging regulation changes and Pirelli introduced different tyres mounted on larger rims.

Pirelli cautioned that teams are therefore effectively “starting from scratch” on Friday. While the layout itself hasn’t changed, the lack of action of any kind over the last few years means the circuit surface may well have undergone significant ageing.

In the run-up to the event, several bumps were smoothened out to accommodate the more sensitive ground-effect machinery.

Picking China of all places to host the first sprint format of the year has raised some eyebrows, with Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz both questioning whether it was really the right move for this year.

It gives teams just 60 minutes of free practice to validate their set-ups, with an even bigger emphasis on simulation work.

But while a sprint adds to the engineers’ headaches, it also provides opportunities to shake things up, which can be good news both for the fans and for teams that aren’t so confident in their outright performance.

“It’s a good challenge that we’re straight into a sprint race,” said Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.

“We’ve not been there with this generation of cars, so the tyres are different, the aerodynamics are very different, there’s a lot of work that we need to do and the bulk of that work gets done in simulation.

“But there is also a bit of re-reading old notes, looking at how the tyres were performing in terms of wear, what was driving degradation to try and build that picture.

“It’s definitely a big challenge, but it’s quite fun and there’s good motivation to work on it because if you can get it right, the opportunities at a sprint race are always greater because someone else may have got it wrong.”

That is especially the case for teams that are expecting to be on the back foot in China, like McLaren. The Woking squad started off the season well, but Shanghai’s combination of slow, winding corners and long straights is exactly what its MCL35…