How Racing Bulls let a driver shootout decide who got its Spa F1 cooling upgrade

With only one roll hoop upgrade available for the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, Racing Bulls decided to have a bit of fun and award it to the quickest driver in Silverstone Formula 1 qualifying

With Racing Bulls duo Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad both delivering consecutive points finishes in recent races, surfing on an uptick in form for the Formula 1 team following an effective Canada upgrade, neither driver has needed any additional motivation to beat the other side of the garage.

But when Racing Bulls was only able to bring one of its Spa-Francorchamps updates to one car, the squad decided to use its driver duo's competitive nature to up the stakes just a little bit.

Racing Bulls introduced its latest upgrade package in Belgium, which includes a revised rear wing, front brake drum assembly and a redesigned engine cover. As part of its efforts to optimise the airflow around the engine cover, the Anglo-Italian also made its roll hoop narrower, which has required a resource intensive modification of its chassis.

Because it wasn't able to perform that modification on both cars in time for Spa, team principal Alan Permane decided to turn the roll hoop upgrade into a mini competition between his two drivers.

"What I did is I sat down with both drivers in Austria," Permane explained. "We’d had a very good qualifying. I thought: 'Okay, while everyone’s in a good mood, I’ll give some bad news. We’ve got a good update coming, but we can only do one car for Spa, and the next car will be done for the race after in Budapest.'

"So, I first suggested that the very simple option that makes it fair is we upgrade no cars for Spa, and then both of them for Budapest. Of course, they looked at me like I was crazy, and I wouldn’t have ever done that, so we didn’t really seriously consider that.

"The next thing I said is that we can flip a coin, or we can make it a little bit of fun and say whoever qualifies in front at Silverstone gets the upgrade."

A side-by-side comparison, with Lindblad's narrower roll hoop visible on the right.

Lawson and Lindblad, who have been closely matched in recent races, needed to hear no more and gladly agreed with upping the ante. "They both signed up for that, and that’s what we did," Permane said.

Both drivers advanced to Q3 in Silverstone, but while Lindblad was able to continue chipping away at his lap time to qualify ninth, Lawson was unable to improve and settled for 10th, deciding the mini competition in the rookie's favour.

But in the interest of fairness, Permane suggested Lawson would get priority the next time a similar situation occurs. "I think what we’ll do if it happens again later in the season, and it may happen later because we’ve got another big thing coming at some point, is it will go to Liam," he explained.

"We won’t do that again. He’ll automatically get it the next time. But we tried to put a little bit of fun into it rather than just allocating it to someone."

Racing Bulls has been the best of the rest leading F1's midfield since it added a significant upgrade to its car in Montreal, in the shape of a redesigned floor.

"We started this car a little bit late last year," Permane explained. "We were in our own championship fight last year for that sixth place, and that was very important to us. We felt the first races were going to be a bit of a struggle.

"We brought a very large upgrade for Melbourne, and we’ve continued to upgrade the car through the season. I think what really switched the car on was the floor we brought to Montreal, and that really did light the car up."