The schedule, strategy and secrets of the US GP in Texas

Formula 1’s home stretch is now monopolized by interest in the battle between the two championships, as with the events of the summer – McLaren’s performance skyrocketing and Red Bull’s steep decline – Lando Norris has closed in on Max Verstappen on 52 points, while McLaren took the constructors’ lead by 41 points from RBR.

There are 6 races and 3 Sprints left in the season, so mathematically everything is wide open – as GP and Sprint wins, along with fastest lap, will share 180 points to the winners.

From May until the previous GP, almost a month ago in Singapore, the McLaren MCL38 was the benchmark among the cars, taking over that role from the Red Bull RB20. And the team says it’s very careful in the upgrades it plans for the MCL38, the delicate balance of not disrupting its balance and letting it stagnate.

The latter’s performance began to take a negative turn from June, when the Milton Keynes team added a series of upgrades that did not perform as expected. At Monza in early September the RB20 hit rock bottom, but since then a new floor has drastically improved its performance in Azerbaijan and Singapore. And more upgrades are coming.

Although RBR has been dogged these days by the case of other teams suspecting it to be illegal regarding the regulation of the car’s height in park-and-hold, which is prohibited, the champion hopes that it is on track to recover and defend its titles . This was, after all, something that Max Verstappen also stated.

Ferrari and Mercedes are in Austin with significant upgrades to both the Ferrari SF-24 and – to a greater extent – the Mercedes W15 in order to get back into the race for victory.

For the Scuderia this is probably the last chance to get back into this year’s constructors’ title battle, as they sit 34 points behind Red Bull. Mercedes aren’t chasing anything at all, sitting a lonely 4th among manufacturers, but they’re certainly doing plenty of testing for the 2025 car.

Tires & strategy

The new asphalt that has been laid in the last two years at COTA makes the first period of free testing especially critical regarding the wear of the tires with increased weight on the lap banks.

The triplet of Pirelli tires here, however, is the same as in previous years: the hard is C2 (with a white rim), the medium is C3 (yellow) and the soft is C4 (red).

The forces exerted on the tires are equally distributed to the front and rear wheels and the vertical ones are stronger than the horizontal ones. Typically tire wear is thermal, and therefore largely dependent on weather conditions – expected to be cloudy.

Teams’ decisions on strategy will be informed by the new tarmac and Saturday’s Sprint set of laps. In last year’s Sprint most drivers opted for the medium tyre, and only a few risked the soft.

Similar were the choices for last year’s race on Sunday, where the medium rubber dominated while the soft was used by some only at the end.

With the relatively little time lost in the pits the 2-pit strategy is normally the fastest in Austin, but if the new asphalt proves less rough it may be easier this year to protect the tire in the race to allow for a one-pit strategy. stop

By far the tire of choice in 2023 was C3 (medium), but again the new asphalt will determine whether C2 (hard) comes into the equation more this year for a pit stop strategy.

GP program ORPA 2024

• Friday, October 18
  20:30-21:30: Free Practice 1 (FP1)

• Saturday 19 Eightbrio
  00:30-01:14 Sprint Qualifying (SQ)
  21:00-22:00: Sprint Race (SR)
• Sunday 20 Eightbrio
  01:00-02:00: Qualifying Tests (Q)
  22:00: Race (GP)

GP USA 2024 / 18-20 Eightin 2024

• First GP: 1959 (Sebring)
• Track length: 5,513 km
• Rounds: 56
• Total route: 308.405 km
• Lap record: Charles Leclerc, 1:36.169 (2019)
• Winner 2023: Max Verstappen
• More wins: 6 (Lewis Hamilton)
• Air temperature forecast: 25-29° Celsius
• Chance of rain: <20% (Sunday), 20% (Saturday), <20% (Friday)
• Probability of entry of the security vehicle: 14%
• Waste of time at the pit stop: 20.3” (of which 2.5” in stop)

See everything worth knowing about the F1 2024 championship in SPORT24’s Great Feature.

5 Hot Info for this track Austin

• The Texas race is the second of three of the US season. It was preceded by Miami in May and followed by Las Vegas in November. F1 managed, thanks to the American Liberty Media that acquired the commercial rights of F1 in 2017, to find its way in the vast land of the star axis.

• He tried it many times before, especially in 1983 when there were again 3 GPs in one season in the USA: Long Beach, Detroit and Las Vegas. But the project was unsuccessful, mainly due to the indifferent drawing of the circuits in these cities.

• F1 has consistently failed in America, despite having visited the US 77 times to date. Only three countries have held more GPs: Italy (107), Britain and Germany (who have 79 each). A total of 11 cities have hosted GPs: Austin, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Las Vegas (on two different circuits), Long Beach, Miami, Phoenix, Riverside, Sebring, Walkins Glen. Read more here.

• The Circuit of Austin (COTA) was designed by German architect Hermann Tilke to put F1 back on the American map. For this reason, in order to offer the maximum spectacle, he drew his inspiration from some legendary points of other believers: from Silverstone or Suzuka corner banks, from the sector of the “Stadium” (Motodrom) of Hockenheim, as well as from the endless turn 8 of the Istanbul circuit.

• In 2012, at the first ever GP at the newly built Austin circuit, in front of 100,000 spectators, Lewis Hamilton took his final victory with McLaren before his move to Mercedes in 2013. It was an exciting GP as Hamilton chased leader Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull) and managed to move into the lead when the German lost time behind a more slow combination. Also, on the same circuit, six years later, Kimi Raikkonen achieved his last victory in Formula 1, with Ferrari.