Belgian GP Benetton Preview

Belgian GP / Preview Pat Symonds, Technical Director of the Mild Seven Benetton Playlife team: THE CIRCUIT:

"Spa Francorchamps is one of the drivers' and engineers' favourite circuits of the year. It's a real race track with some really quick difficult corners. It is reasonably hard to set the car up as you need a good balance in some very fast corners and yet you still need to have good traction out of the hairpin and the top chicane. This is relatively difficult compromise to reach, but a hugely satisfying one once you get the car going well. Spa also contains one of the best corners in the world which is Eau Rouge. It is a corner that is important for lap times, as it determines your speed on the straight up the hill. It is equally one of the most difficult corners as the car has to be very stable as it takes a big compressive load due to the change in slope of the road there." OTHER FACTORS:

"Weather plays a huge part in races at Spa and you really have to be on the ball and prepared to react quickly to all weather conditions." THE CARS:

"The cars will be running on a medium downforce configuration similar the one we used in Canada. We don't have any substantial changes to the car just some small modifications to the aerodynamics. We are running the new long wheelbase car again to try and get the most out of the wider Bridgestone front tyre." TESTING:

"We have been testing this last week at Magny Cours. We concentrated on wet tyres and have been running on an artificially wetted circuit as a prelude to Spa and its notorious weather. We have been specifically looking at the intermediate tyre, trying to find a better one than we have at the moment. On the final day [Tuesday] of Magny Cours we did some tyre construction testing and on Friday we moved to Danielson with both drivers using the whole day to concentrate on start practices."