James Allison on the European Grand Prix

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"The new top rear wing will offer better overtaking potential during the race"

James Allison looks at the return to Europe, where the medium tyre compound will be making its race debut.

What are the key challenges in Valencia?
Valencia is dominated by low speed corners. Although there are a couple of fast corners, they are normally taken flat out so the challenge, therefore, is to get the car working well in slow corners. Furthermore, as this will be the first opportunity to run the new medium tyre compound in a Grand Prix, it will be important to get settled on it quickly and to establish a good race setup with it.

Valencia has not seen the greatest amount of overtaking in previous races – should this year be different?
I would expect it to be different this year, yes. The straight is long enough for DRS to function and there is likely to be a reasonably different level of performance from the two tyre compounds. This will lead to plenty of overtaking.

What evolutions and modifications are planned for the car?
As always, there will be a host of aero updates. The most significant of these will be a new top rear wing with a bigger DRS switching effect. This will bring outright lap time in qualifying and offer better overtaking potential during the race.

How do you evaluate the performance of the R31 in wet and variable conditions at the Canadian GP?
We were not very happy with the performance of the car on either the full wet or the intermediate tyres. However, once we got on to the dry tyres at the end of the race we looked much more in the hunt and were able to make inroads on all but the top two cars.

Nick and Vitaly both looked very strong in Montreal – how difficult is it to make strategy calls in conditions like those experienced there?
We looked OK on the dry tyres, but while on the wet weather rubber we were kept in the race as a result of a good reading of the rain radar and good strategy calls. In changeable conditions like we saw there, it is extremely difficult to make the correct decisions all the time as there is a degree of luck involved. All that Alan Permane (Chief Engineer) and Matthieu Dubois (Strategist) can do is to hope to have a good batting average. Thankfully they are pretty reasonable at it, and at the last race they made another set of decent calls to leave us well placed to capitalise on very difficult circumstances.

We're now back in Europe for the next six races – how does this affect the development programme?
Europe or flyaway races do not really have an impact on the development programme these days. We push as hard as we can from the first race to the last, and we will try to bring new performance to each and every race in the championship. We have a more efficient rear wing for Valencia, and we are looking to ensure that we make as good a job as possible of coping with the impending changes to the blown floor engine mapping.