25 Jun 2018

Race 8 – 53 Laps – 5.842km per lap – 309.690km race distance – low tyre wear

French GP F1 Strategy Report Podcast – our host Michael Lamonato is joined by Matt Clayton – Editor from Red Bull Motorsport

HAMILTON WIN, VETTEL RECOVERY ILLUSTRATES BATTLE OF TWO TIERS

The return of the French Grand Prix after a decade off the calendar delivered the sort of straightforward race many predicted ahead of the race at Circuit Paul Ricard.

Sebastian Vettel and Valtteri Bottas’s lap-one crash, dropping both to the back, was a blessing and a curse — on the one hand it created some precious overtaking opportunities as the two recovered places, but it also robbed the race of what could have been an interesting tactical duel.

THE BACKGROUND

Mercedes brought an upgraded power unit to France after delaying its introduction at the previous race in Canada, and the extra two weeks allowed engineers to squeeze some extra power out of the specification, which was useful around Circuit Paul Ricard’s fast and sweeping bends.

Working Mercedes’s favour too was that the circuit’s surface characteristics were similar to those found at the Spanish Grand Prix, which the Silver Arrows dominated.

Pirelli brought the same thin-tread tyres to this race — in soft, supersoft and ultrasoft format — which Ferrari struggled with in Spain to Mercedes’s advantage. All things combined, Mercedes was looking good to record its first win since May.

QUALIFYING

Mercedes topped all three practice sessions and segments of qualifying, with Lewis Hamilton leading Valtteri Bottas for a front-row lockout.

As is becoming the norm, the strategic battle at the front is in part decided by tyre choice in Q2, which top-10 drivers must start the race on. Mercedes and Red Bull Racing opted for supersofts — rain was forecast for the race, meaning a longer first stint might have allowed a direct switch to wet-weather tyres — but Ferrari, knowing it needed something to differentiate itself from Mercedes if it was to take on the dominant team, opted to start on ultrasofts.

THE DECISIVE MOMENT

The French Grand Prix’s most important moment wasn’t a tactical decision but a crash between Sebastian Vettel and Valtteri Bottas at the first turn. Vettel executed an excellent start, but his speed only boxed him onto the apex with Lewis Hamilton ahead and Bottas to the right. He locked up and knocked the Finn off the road, damaging both cars in an incident that later earnt him a five-second penalty.

Both drivers switched to the soft tyre, the most durable of the weekend, in an attempt to make it to the end of the race without another stop.

Astounding was the speed with which that Vettel scythed through the field. His car repaired, he took just 14 laps to climb from 17th to fifth behind teammate Kimi Raikkonen. Bottas made slower progress due to damage to his car.

It served to illustrate how fast the frontrunning cars are if only they unleashed their pace — but both also suffered for having to thrash their tyres.

There was a momentary stand-off between Ferrari and Mercedes. Ferrari didn’t want to pit Vettel he would have emerged from pit lane behind Bottas, who was then in sixth. Mercedes blinked first, hoping fresher tyres would solidify Bottas’s chances of jumping the driver who knocked him out of podium contention, but a rear jack failure meant the stop was much longer than usual — so much so that Vettel was able to pit and maintain position ahead of the Finn. Bottas finished the race seventh.

As an interesting point on the duo’s recovery, Vettel noted that the relative ease of overtaking was partly due to a strong headwind down the back straight which made slipstreaming and the DRS more effective.

ZERO-STOP DIDN’T WORK

The ‘zero-stop’ strategy employed by Vettel, Bottas, Fernando Alonso, Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin — stopping on the first lap behind the safety car in an attempt to make it to the end — was attractive because degradation was low, but wear remained high thanks in part to the aerodynamically demanding nature of parts of the track and Pirelli’s thinner tread.

The dangers of pushing tyres too far was boldly illustrated by Stroll, who locked up his front-left tyre late in the race so significantly that it failed a few laps from the finish, pitching him off the track.

Sirotkin was the only driver to take the chequered flag without making a change after lap one, with Fernando Alonso having made a lap-46 change to new ultrasoft tyres in an attempt to record the fastest lap. Unfortunately for him, his suspension failed and he was forced to retire from the race, albeit classified P16.

TYRES LAST LONGER THAN EXPECTED

An increasingly defining characteristic of 2018 racing is that drivers — or perhaps teams — are unwilling to push the maximum of their performance envelopes. This is partly down to managing their power units, of which each driver has only three for the entire 21-race season, but it is also thanks to overtaking being particularly difficult in the current aerodynamics-heavy regulatory era.

The French Grand Prix was tipped to feature little overtaking thanks to its relative lack of heavy braking zones. This combined with the Circuit Paul Ricard’s long pit lane, the speed limit for which was reduced to 60 kilometres per hour due to the nature of the bend on pit entry that potentially put the Mercedes garage in a perilous situation were a car to lose control there, meant teams were predisposed to stop just once and therefore order their drivers to eke out the maximum life from their tyres.

Kimi Raikkonen’s 34-lap stint on ultrasofts, the softest and least durable tyre of the weekend, is a case in point. His teammate, Sebastian Vettel, was able to extract just five extra laps from his soft compounds, the most durable of the range, because he was forced to push flat out after the safety car to recover position.

Aerodynamics, not the tyres, is the limiting factor in racing.

Tyre data

Courtesy of Pirelli Motorsport

30 May 2018

Race 6 – 78 Laps – 3.337km per lap – 260.268km race distance – medium tyre wear

Monaco GP F1 Strategy Report Podcast – our host Michael Lamonato is joined by Laurence Edmondson ESPN F1 editor

RICCIARDO CONQUERS MONACO AT SLOWEST POSSIBLE SPEED

Daniel Ricciardo recorded a gutsy win in Monaco despite losing his MGU-K, worth around 120 kilowatts, on lap 18, leaving him more than 20 kilometres per hour down on straight-line speed compared to second-placed Sebastian Vettel.

His route to victory added some much-needed tension to the usual predictability of the Monaco Grand Prix, which turned on the ability of teams to master the tyre compounds on the resurfaced street circuit.

THE BACKGROUND

Pirelli debuted its hypersoft tyre in Monaco, the softest tyre it has ever produced for Formula One, alongside the ultrasoft and supersoft compounds. Teams stocked up on the hypersoft — all drivers had seven sets remaining after Thursday practice but just one set of each of the harder compounds — on the basis it is a substantially faster compound and on the assumption it would last the majority of the race given the uniquely undemanding Circuit de Monaco profile.

However, practice suggested this wasn’t the case, with the hypersoft having a limited life span and requiring more management to be effective. Pirelli estimated drivers starting on the hypersoft — in other worst those who qualify in the top 10 — would have to change off the pink-striped tyre by around lap 15.

It left midfield drivers in the top 10 potentially vulnerable to those starting just outside the top 10 on one of the more durable compounds, which offered more flexibility for a race in which the timing of a pit stop can be crucial in the ultimate result.

QUALIFYING

Mercedes attempted to make it into the top-10 shootout with the ultrasoft tyre in order to start on the compound, but the tyre was far too slow compared to the hypersoft to pull it off.

Daniel Ricciardo took pole ahead of Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel and Mercedes’s Lewis Hamilton, but whereas Kimi Raikkonen and Valtteri Bottas followed for Ferrari and Mercedes respectively, Ricciardo’s Red Bull Racing teammate, Max Verstappen, had crashed at the end of free practice three, causing too much damage to be repaired in time to take part in qualifying, leaving the Dutchman to start from the back.

THE DECISIVE MOMENT

Daniel Ricciardo led the top five away from the line in grid order — his first hurdle — meaning the only likely way he would be usurped for the lead was strategically.

Lewis Hamilton was the first to pit on lap 12 in an attempt to undercut Vettel and Ricciardo, but warm-up on the ultrasoft tyre was so difficult he actually lost time to his rivals. Vettel waited until lap 16 to stop, and Ricciardo, Raikkonen and Bottas followed on the next lap to cover each other off.

There was no change of order, however, and Mercedes was the only team to split its strategies, putting Bottas on the supersoft tyre. It turned out to be the superior compound in the middle of the race, but not enough for the Finn to pass his compatriot Kimi Raikkonen for fourth.

Were it not for the power unit problems, Ricciardo was essentially home by this point, but given his lack of engine performance, a safety car would’ve presented him with a new challenge. Vettel and Hamilton, for example, may have stopped for fresh tyres to give themselves a greater pace advantage with which they could attempt to force the issue on the Australian. Fortunately for him, no safety car was required.

THE CONTRA STRATEGY

Nico Hulkenberg and Max Verstappen used the reverse strategy — starting on the ultrasoft to end the race with a blast on the hypersoft tyre on low fuel — worked a treat for both, earning them three and eleven places respectively, though Verstappen’s move up the grid was also down to a series of overtaking moves in the first stint.

Hulkenberg was up to sixth when he made his lap-50 stop, dropping behind Pierre Gasly; Fernando Alonso, who retired; and his teammate, Carlos Sainz, who let him past without fuss.

Verstappen dropped from ninth to 11th after his lap-47 stop and need to pass only Sainz, which he did shortly after Hulkenberg scythed past, finish ninth once Alonso’s McLaren stopped with a gearbox problem.

GASLY GOES LONG

Pierre Gasly finished s superb seventh after pushing his hypersoft tyres an impressive 37 laps for his opening stint. The Toro Rosso driver was up to sixth when he made his stop, which dropped him behind Ocon, Alonso, Hulkenberg and Verstappen. The latter two hadn’t made their stops yet and fell behind once they did, and Alonso’s retirement promoted him to P7 to score some impressive points.

FORCE INDIA vs McLAREN

Force India’s Esteban Ocon started sixth and spent most of the race battling McLaren’s Fernando Alonso before he retired before taking the chequered flag in his qualifying position.

Alonso attempted to undercut Ocon by pitting first on lap 19, and he was aided in his question by teammate Stoffel Vandoorne, who lamented after the race that he had been left out longer than his chief rivals at the time — Charles Leclerc, Brendon Hartley and Kevin Magnussen — just to hold up Max Verstappen to allow Alonso to emerge from pits ahead of the Dutchman.

It gave Alonso the chance to maximise his pace on the new tyres, but it wasn’t enough, with Ocon emerging from pits still ahead of the Spaniard after a lap-23 stop.

Ocon was clever in maximising his race time, allowing Hamilton to breeze past him out of the tunnel on lap 13 after the Briton had made his stop — a futile defence against a faster car might’ve been enough to reverse that one-second margin he held on Alonso after his own stop.

Sergio Perez had a difficult afternoon after his first pit stop, which was slow and dropped him behind Brendon Hartley, Charles Leclerc and Marcus Ericsson when he should’ve been battling with Carlos Sainz, who was four places up the road.

Nathan Harper

Tyre data

Courtesy of Pirelli Motorsport

16 May 2018

Race 5 – 66 Laps – 4.655km per lap – 307.104km race distance – medium tyre wear

Spanish GP F1 Strategy Report Podcast – our host Michael Lamonato is joined by Peter Anderson from TheRedline.com.au

TRACK POSITION KING IN SPANISH PODIUM FIGHT

Mercedes dealt Ferrari a painful blow at the Spanish Grand Prix by dominating qualifying and the race, but some of the Scuderia’s wounds were self-inflicted.

Kimi Raikkonen’s engine failure was compounded by a pit stop error that robbed Sebastian Vettel of a podium place, leaving the Scuderia with just 12 points on a day the Silver Arrows claimed the maximum score.

But still lingering are questions about Pirelli’s modified tyres, which Ferrari is adamant robbed it of the pace it used so successfully in the opening rounds of the season.

THE BACKGROUND

The Spanish Grand Prix is a stringent test of a car’s aerodynamics, with its combinations of fast, sweeping corners being one of the primary motivators for the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya’s use as a preseason testing venue.

Those same characteristics mean two things for the grand prix weekend: first, harder compound tyres a required to handle the aerodynamic load; and second, overtaking is hard, meaning holding track position takes strategic precedence over making more than one pit stop.

Adding an intriguing twist to preceding this season was Pirelli’s decision to thin the tread on its medium, soft and supersoft compounds especially for this race after several teams, principally Mercedes, reported dangerous tyre blistering around the circuit, which is newly resurfaced this year. Thinner tread will also be used at the French and British grands prix, run on similar track surfaces.

Reducing tread thickness reduces the incidence of overheating, the primary cause of blistering, but some teams, chief amongst them Ferrari, believed the problem was more about Mercedes struggling with tyre management rather than an issue with the compounds themselves.

Mercedes’s dominance of the weekend, a surprise given the team’s more moderate form during the first four races of the year, only worked to strengthen Ferrari’s belief that the tyre change had played into the hands of the reigning world champion constructor.

QUALIFYING

Teams struggled to activate the supersoft tyre despite the cool conditions theoretically favouring its use over the soft and the medium. So middling was the red-stiped tyre’s performance that all top-10 qualifiers bar Fernando Alonso made it into Q3 with the soft rather than the supersoft compound, and both Ferrari drivers set their fastest Q3 times on the yellow tyre.

THE DECISIVE MOMENT

Sebastian Vettel had jumped Valtteri Bottas for second place off the line, and though the Ferrari wasn’t quite as fast as the Mercedes, Bottas didn’t have anywhere near the pace advantage to make an impression on Vettel around a circuit that already makes overtaking extremely difficult.

Mercedes had only one opportunity to retake the position, and it came on lap 17, when Vettel made his first pit stop to try to guard against an undercut. It was a conservative call by the Scuderia, and its short-term defensive strategy to cover Bottas committed it to a two-stop, with the team losing focus on the bigger picture. It would come back to bite later in the race.

Bottas unleashed his superior pace and stopped on lap 19, recovering enough time while Vettel warmed up his new medium tyres to reclaim the place, but his pit stop was 1.4 seconds slower than Vettel’s, undoing his good work and leaving him third.

Mercedes needn’t have worried, however, as Ferrari didn’t believe it had the tyre life to finish the race without another stop, and it made its second tyre change — another new set of mediums — under the virtual safety car on lap 41.

Vettel should have lost just the one place to Bottas, but his stop was a whopping 5.6 seconds thanks to him overshooting his grid box and a problem changing the rear-right wheel. He emerged in fourth behind Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen, who he was unable to pass before the end of the race.

TYRES ON A KNIFE EDGE

Valtteri Bottas made managing a lopsided one-stop strategy, pitting on lap 19, look easy, but his 47 laps on the medium tyre pushed the rubber beyond its known life span, and the Finn remarked that the canvass was visible on his tyres at the end of the race.

Considering how much Ferrari was suffering with tyre wear, it puts into perspective Vettel’s stop, which the German was unlikely to have been able to do without after making his first stop so early.

What we couldn’t ascertain was whether Ferrari would have been capable of a one-stop at all, with Kimi Raikkonen retiring on lap 25 with an engine problem. Had he reached lap 34, the optimal one-stop window, he likely would’ve claimed the final podium place ahead of Max Verstappen given he was ahead of both Red Bull Racing drivers before the failure.

VIRTUAL SAFETY CAR COMES UNDER SCRUTINY

Sebastian Vettel lamented what he described as a loophole in the virtual safety car system by which drivers can lap faster than the minimum time set by taking unusual lines to shorten the race track.

Race director Charlie Whiting dismissed the German’s criticism out of hand, insisting a driver’s lap time is measured against a predefined delta time every 50 metres to ensure compliance.

That’s not to say a driver can’t use the delta time to his advantage, however. If a driver were to lap significantly slower than the delta for half the lap, they could then lap significantly faster on the other half, for example, and cross the line still below the mandatory delta time.

This sort of approach was partly behind Fernando Alonso mugging Charles Leclerc at the end of the virtual safety car period on lap 42. The Spaniard appeared to tactically slow in the final sector to buy himself acceleration time on the straight as the virtual safety car ended.

Alonso remained within the delta time, but by the time Leclerc started accelerating, Alonso was already on the throttle and flying past, taking him up to eighth place.

Nathan Harper

Tyre data

Courtesy of Pirelli Motorsport

1 May 2018

Race 4 – 51 Laps – 6.003km per lap – 306.049km race distance – low tyre wear

Azerbaijan GP F1 Strategy Report Podcast – our host Michael Lamonato is joined by Chris Medland from Racer Magazine

BOTTAS STRATEGY GAMBLE COMES UNDONE IN BAKU

Valtteri Bottas should have won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix after executing a flawless weekend and pulling off a bold strategic gamble on the timing of his sole pit stop, but an errant bit of debris on the front straight undid his good work, causing a puncture so sudden and severe that he was forced to retire from the race altogether.

Instead Lewis Hamilton inherited victory on a day even the Briton admitted he wasn’t the best driver on the track, such is the unpredictable nature of the Baku City Circuit.

THE BACKGROUND

The Azerbaijan Grand Prix has shifted from its previous June calendar slot to the end of April, with a side-effect being substantially cooler weather and, at least on this weekend, far windier conditions.

The dusty, slippery circuit was made treacherous by peak gusts of up to 80 kilometres per hour on race day, and the alignment of the buildings meant the direction of the breeze was subject to sudden and surprising change.

Baku’s long front straight, low-degradation surface and lack of high-energy corners means tyre warm-up has always been difficult, but the cold weather made it even more so this year, with even the ultrasoft tyre, the compound with the lowest operating range of the selection brought to Azerbaijan experiencing graining due to lack of temperature.

Adding to the difficult was that the current soft tyre compound had ever appeared at this track in the past, meaning teams and drivers had their work cut out for them to master the circuit in time for the race.

QUALIFYING

The ultrasoft was quickly judged to be a poor race tyre, so Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull Racing attempted to qualify for Q3 with the supersoft, with only Kimi Raikkonen unable to do so.

Both Force India and both Renault drivers likewise started on ultrasofts in the top 10, with all other bottom-10 cars starting on the supersoft compound bar Brendon Hartley and Romain Grosjean, who started on softs.

THE DECISIVE MOMENT

Lewis Hamilton struggled to extend the life of his first set of tyres and was forced to change to new softs on lap 22, leaving Sebastian Vettel and Valtteri Bottas out in an unusual duel — the supersofts were lasting longer than expected, and both were considering extending long enough to switch to the faster ultrasoft tyre for a short stint at the end of the race.

Vettel blinked first, however, stopping on lap 30 and leaving Bottas in the lead of the race, and when Mercedes saw Bottas could still set competitive time, it left him out and gambled on the likelihood of a safety car winning him a free pit stop, from which he could emerge with his lead intact.

The decisive moment came on lap 39, when Red Bull Racing teammates Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen crashed at turn one, triggering the safety car Bottas needed.

But Vettel too took a new set of tyres — as did the rest of the field — and attempted to reclaim the lead at the first turn on the restart. He locked up and ran wide, dropping to fourth.

The win should’ve been Bottas’s, but debris on the front straight punctured his rear-left tyre one lap later, sending him out of the race.

A RACE OF MANAGEMENT (AND NOT CRASHING)

Kimi Raikkonen and Sergio Perez drove strong races to second and third and were testament to the Azerbaijan Grand Prix virtue of keeping your head down while the rest of the field crumbles.

Both drivers were hit with damage in first-lap melees but both recovered with long middle stints on the soft tyre, passing drivers as they stopped later in the race.

Charles Leclerc too drove a clean race to claim his debut F1 points, moving from 13th on the grid to sixth at the flag with Pirelli’s convention one-stop strategy, though he added an extra stop behind the second safety car.

DID RENAULT MISS ITS COMEBACK PODIUM?

Carlos Sainz finished fifth for Renault’s best result since its F1 return as a constructor, but Sergio Perez serves as an interesting case study for what could have been.

Sainz was ahead of Perez when the Mexican was forced to pit with damage behind the lap-one safety car, but Force India’s long middle stint on the soft through to the second safety car proved one of the fastest race strategies, allowing the driver to bypass the messy mid-race pit stops of the rest of the midfield.

Fernando Alonso, who finished seventh after dropping to second last with damage on lap two, used the same strategy to great effect in a heavily damaged car, as did Romain Grosjean — see below — who harried Perez for much of the race.

Renault couldn’t have known it at the time, but a podium chance could’ve been on the cards.

VANDOORNE ACES SAFETY CAR STRATEGY, GROSJEAN DOES NOT

Romain Grosjean could also have made himself a 2018 podium-getter, having trailed Perez by only a few seconds in the middle part of the race on the same strategy, but the Frenchman’s grand prix ended with an embarrassing crash behind the safety car, capping off a difficult weekend for the Haas driver.

It left Haas with no points after Kevin Magnussen tangled with Pierre Gasly at the second safety car restart despite having a contender for fourth-fastest car.

Grosjean’s crash is attributable to the difficulty drivers had warming up their tyres on the particular circuit layout and in the cool conditions, and the task was made doubly difficult at the reduced speed behind the safety car.

Stoffel Vandoorne, however, found an ingenious solution around the problem — the Belgian made a pit stop on the lap before the restart, which meant the tyres he had on the first racing lap would have just come out of their blankets and have been at a reasonable working temperature.

It had the double benefit of dropping him behind the field and allowing him to complete that last caution lap at a higher speed while catching up, allowing him to keep the temperatures high. He made up five positions in four laps to end his race in the points.

Though he didn’t stop behind the safety car, he gained three positions from the Verstappen-Vettel crash: one each from the belligerents and another from Hamilton, who had to leave the track to avoid becoming collateral damage, all of which came about as a consequence of Red Bull Racing topping its drivers for fresh tyres.

Nathan Harper

Tyre data

Courtesy of Pirelli Motorsport