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As to engineering the cars to best navigate this somewhat surreal track, well, it's really a matter of giving the car as much downforce as possible, the softest tyres as possible and giving the rear wing a gentle pat of the hand as the driver pulls away, hoping he brings the thing back in one piece. A lap of Monaco is little more than a crazed two-mile dash around the houses. The trick is simply not to hit anything. Do that seventy-eight times on a Sunday afternoon and you just might pick up a trophy.
The dash down to turn one, the tight right-hander, Sainte-Devote will see the car understeer. The car will touch 160mph before braking, the road is dusty and the camber does nothing to help, so understeer is inevitable. Countless drivers have lost it at this corner, the car forlornly sliding, front first into the tyre barrier. If you're lucky you may be able to make use of the small slip road but more often than not it's the barrier you're going to find, seemingly beckoning the car into the Armco. Soft tyres will help, as will endowing the car with a little more roll than usual.
Should your car survive Saint-Devote, it then needs good traction as you begin the climb up past the swish boutiques on the left, on past the hotel Hermitage, also on the left, and on towards Massenet. We're now at the highest part of the track. There's a really cool view over the Med from here. Mind you, if you're approaching the corner at 170mph I think your engineers would prefer you to concentrate on other things.
Because the track is all public roads the surface is either immensely dusty or awash with a heady mix of
oil, transmission fluid and poodle droppings. Traction is at a premium. The electronics governing both the engine, transmission and differential will help with this to a degree but getting the power down at Monaco is always problematic. The engineers will also shift the car's weight distribution rearward. Not much, perhaps 2-3%, just sufficient to add a little extra mass to the rear end.
From Massenet the track runs left past the hotel de Paris (swanky place), then right, past the casino, before dropping downhill towards the very tight right-hander: Mirabeau. This stretch of road, from Casino to Mirabeau is horribly bumpy. About halfway down this relatively short stretch is a huge bump. You'll notice the drivers flicking right/left to avoid as much of it as possible. It's extremely easy for the car to become unsettled over this bump, a result of the disrupted airflow beneath the car. Actually, all of Monaco is bumpy, but this is perhaps the worst section of all. Back in the pits the mechanics will have raised the car's ride-height to help prevent the FIA's legality skid-block from bottoming too much here.
As a rule of thumb, the ride-height at Monaco will be somewhere between 5-8mm higher than a purpose built track. Raising the car like this hampers the aerodynamics but better to sacrifice a little aero performance than risk damaging the plank and facing the possibility of exclusion from the race. Can you imagine going through the hell that is a Monaco weekend, winning the race, only to be thrown out of the results for some trivial technical infraction come post-race scrutineering? It's the stuff of sleepless nights.
