Formula 1's customer teams are set to face the biggest headache during the Miami Grand Prix should any changes to the power unit regulations come into force.

Potential tweaks have been under discussion through the break since the last race in Japan, with some adjustments expected to be agreed and introduced immediately.

The complication is that Miami is a sprint weekend, with Friday’s single FP1 session followed by qualifying for the sprint event.

The schedule means that all teams will be under pressure to learn as much as they can about the impact of any rule tweaks in that first hour, with customers likely to be on a steeper learning curve than the works outfits.

“With the changes to the energy management, that's something that is more managed by our power unit partner, and they will come up with a strategy based upon that,” Haas head of car engineering Hoagy Nidd said on Friday.

“They'll obviously have to introduce their software changes. I think that some of the required submission dates for software before the event have been delayed a little bit, which will help all of the power unit manufacturers in order to get code written and deployed and then a chance to actually test it.

“So once it gets through that phase, it will then come to us in terms of extra work that we need to do. We need to dedicate a bit more time to understanding what the changes mean, and then how that will affect our vehicle performance and where we need to target in order to do that.”

Nidd noted that it’s inevitable that teams will have to prioritise PU work in the single Miami practice session.

“It's not massive, but it does shift the priority slightly once we get to the event,” he noted.

“You'll probably see teams doing slightly different things in that P1 session than they would normally do. Normally in a P1 you go out, you try and get the car as sorted as you can within those first couple of runs. You're dedicated to looking at things like tyres, some basic setup changes, things like that as well.

“In Miami in parallel we're going to have to go out and actually test the software and look at try and get through some of the different parts of the strategy during P1, whether that's testing boost, whether it's trying to look at the overtake, whether it's making sure the launch is okay. So there would definitely be some shifts in priorities, probably across the whole grid.”

Customer F1 teams not "heavily" involved in power unit rule change talks

Nidd acknowledged that it’s always harder for customers to adapt given that the works outfits have a clear advantage in terms of the homework and simulation that they can do in advance.

“Obviously, as a customer team, you are always the recipient of that,” he said. “Previously in my career, I'd been in the works teams. I was in Mercedes for 11 years. I was in Ferrari, and I was on the power unit side there. And of course, the nature of being a customer team is you have to get what you're given.

“And there's an element of us being able to feed back, but we will never be the main priority. That's just the reality of being a customer team. We have an opportunity with our power unit partners to work pretty well – it’s one of the better relationships I've ever seen in F1.

“But at the end of the day, you've got to know that you will have to race what you're given. And with the additional complexity of the energy management this year, in the early parts of the year, I think we've seen other customer teams in F1 say that they maybe have felt like you end up with the performance you're given on the car.

“It's difficult to move too far outside of that, because we don't have all of the facts and figures and the full understanding of how the software exactly is going to work.”

Nidd noted that as a customer Haas has had limited input into the debate over potential rule changes, which has been led by the manufacturers: “We haven't really got heavily involved in that, other than the discussions around preparing what's going to be said in the meetings that have been going on this week.

“We obviously have quite a close working relationship with Ferrari on that as well. So we have to make sure that what we want aligns with what they want. So that's really how we worked on that.

“But that's more of an ongoing thing, that stuff just goes on throughout the year and all of the time. And that hasn't been something we've pushed on from the factory here at home in this period particularly hard.”