The last few Grands Prix have been decided by race strategy; good planning and execution. And Monaco looks set to be the same. Mercedes has taken three poles in a row, but lost out on race day. Will Monaco offer them a chance to hold on and win the race? If the race is a marginal one or two stop race, will Lotus and Ferrari be able to play a strategic game to get the win? Ferrari hasn’t won Monaco for 12 years. From a strategy point of view the Monaco Grand Prix is a very tricky race as cars More…

This race may come to be viewed as a tipping point in the ongoing debate about whether the high degradation Pirelli tyres are good for F1 or not, as two of the three drivers on the podium did a four stop strategy. Pirelli has indicated that they have been “too aggressive” with the construction of the 2013 tyres and will make changes from the seventh round, Montreal, onwards. However against this backdrop, the strategy battle at the heart of this race was fascinating. And it showed that the teams who came out on top were the ones who had the More…

The Formula 1 engineers have a love/hate relationship with Circuit de Catalunya; it is the track they know the best from the pre-season testing that has been held there for many years, but it is an enigmatic circuit, always changing with temperature and wind conditions. A car, which flies in the morning, can be uncompetitive in the afternoon, without anything being changed on the car itself. As the first European race of the season it is also a track where teams bring their first major technical update package to the car, which will have taken 10-12 weeks of wind tunnel More…

This weekend’s Bahrain promises to be another tense race and is likely to be decided on race strategy, if last weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix and last year’s Bahrain Grand Prix are anything to go by. And one important detail to note is that Pirelli has changed the tyre specification for this weekend from the soft compound tyres which proved short-lived in China, to mediums, which have been used in every race so far. Alongside this tyre is the hard compound, which was used in Malaysia. Due to lead times and logistics, this decision will have been made before the Chinese More…

The UBS Chinese Grand Prix was another tense race and the outcome was once again decided by race strategy. What made it particularly interesting was that there were different approaches among the leading teams, forced by the disparate performance levels of the soft and medium Pirelli tyres. Team strategists had to find a way to do the fastest race, which meant spending the least amount of time on the weaker tyre and running in clear air as much as possible. Here, with the help and input of several team strategists as well as JA on F1 technical adviser Mark Gillan, More…

After the dramas of the first two Grands Prix, the tenth running of the Chinese Grand Prix should provide another very open contest, with strategic decisions likely to be the deciding factor once again. After the high temperatures and high tyre degradation of Malaysia, Shanghai will see a less extreme picture, as far as tyre wear is concerned. Whereas Sepang was all about managing the rear tyres, Shanghai is all about getting the front tyres at the optimum temperature for qualifying and then managing them in the race. The first sector of the lap features a series of slow corners; More…

The Malaysian Grand Prix provided some extraordinary talking points with the dispute between Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber the main focus. Although this was primarily a dispute over trust and team orders, some curious race strategy decisions created the circumstances for the Red Bull drama and the Mercedes team orders, as we shall see. Pre-race considerations After the practice sessions the feeling among team strategists was that tyre degradation would be very high, while wear was expected to mean that medium tyres would last 15 laps with the hard lasting 18 laps. But the decisive data would be the degradation More…

The Brazilian Grand Prix was a rollercoaster of a race, with positions and fortunes changing from lap to lap as intermittent rain caused chaos. Sebastian Vettel managed to survive a first lap collision, a broken radio and four pitstops to fight back from 17th place on lap one to sixth at the end to secure the points he needed to win the world championship for the third time. Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, went from seventh on the grid to second at the end, but did not have the pace in the Ferrari to challenge Jenson Button for the win, which would More…

Ferrari will need no reminding of how painful the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was for the team; it highlighted how critical Race Strategy really is and how a bad call can cost the world championship. Following a strategic blunder by the Ferrari engineers, Fernando Alonso came out of a pit stop behind a slower car, which he could not then overtake. It cost him the world championship, which was won by the man he challenges again this year for the title, Sebastian Vettel. Yas Marina is tough circuit on which to overtake and so qualifying and race strategy are More…

The Yeongam circuit, in South Korea, was new to the calendar in 2010 and it is a mix of different concepts, with a long straight and some high-speed corners early on in the lap, and then a series of tight blind bends at the end, around which the organizers hope to build a Monaco-like cityscape with a harbour. The slow sections contribute to making this one of the slowest average speed laps of any permanent circuit. This makes it quite a tough track to set the car up for, with a debate over whether straight line speed should be prioritized More…

The Japanese Grand Prix this year was a fairly straight forward race, largely due to the lack of competition at the front, after Fernando Alonso was eliminated at the start and Mark Webber and Romain Grosjean were thrown down the order following their collision. Nevertheless strategy played a central part in Felipe Massa’s break-though result and led to some of the other talking points of the race, like the Perez vs Hamilton battle and Schumacher’s challenge for points from the back of the grid. Pre-race thinking Before the race, the thinking was that two stops was the way to go, More…

The Italian Grand Prix was one of the most exciting races of the 2012 season so far, which is unusual for Monza. The track has a high-speed character and opportunities for overtaking, but doesn’t always provide excitement. However this year’s race was brought alive by the strategy decisions made by some of the teams and the bold gamble taken by many of them to try to do the race with only one pit stop. It was marginal in terms of tyre life. Some of the tyres that came off the cars at the end had no more than a lap More…

The Hungarian Grand Prix was far from being a thriller in terms of on track action with hardly any overtaking after the first laps. But it was a very interesting tactical race which leaves a lot of questions to answer, like could Lotus have won the race if they’d done things differently? Why did Button and the Red Bulls make three stops? And how close did Hamilton come to not winning? Pre-race expectations, On Sunday morning most of the strategists were saying it would be a wet race. The forecast had not changed for five days and rain would fall More…

The choice of the soft and medium compounds, rather than soft and supersoft Pirelli used last year, is quite conservative and has surprised some teams which would have benefited from the supersoft tyre. Pirelli say it’s because the medium operates well at lower temperatures, like we had last year, but it will also suit teams who run well on mediums. Perhaps there has been some lobbying there…It means that the strategy will probably come down to fine margins with two stops being the target. It will be interesting to see whether the medium tyre turns out to be the better More…

So far this season we have seen quite a number of races won on race strategy and with uncertain conditions forecast for Silverstone and cool temperatures making the behaviour of the tyres unpredictable, it should be another interesting weekend. As always there are many things for the teams to consider when planning how they attack the weekend. Here’s how we see it: Silverstone is loved by the drivers and engineers because of the many high speed corners it offers. It provides a rigorous test of aerodynamic efficiency, like Barcelona. The track was built on a wartime airfield and is in More…

[Updated] Last year’s Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona was widely heralded as one of the most exciting race finishes of the season, largely due to the way race strategies played out, with an intense battle for the lead in the final laps of the race between Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton. Vettel managed to hold on to take the win. However tyre degradation was very severe last year and after the recent Bahrain Grand Prix there were complaints from Michael Schumacher, as well as from many fans, that the racing is suffering from drivers not been able to push to More…

The Bahrain Grand Prix was another example of close racing with uncertain outcomes, dependent on race strategy, which has already come to characterise the 2012 F1 season. Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull became the fourth different car/driver winning combination in four races, showing not only how closely matched the teams are, but also how delicate the balancing act is in getting the strategy right on the Pirelli tyres. In just four races we have already had eight different drivers on the podium, more than in the whole of 2011. Bahrain’s Sakhir circuit provided the sternest test yet of the tyres, More…

The Japanese Grand Prix was all about race strategy. With tyre wear much more tricky to manage than expected, throughout the field the drivers who succeeded were the ones whose teams got the strategy right, not just on race day but on qualifying day too. There were some pretty contrasting races at the front. Of the top three, Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull had the worst tyre performance and Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari had the best. Alonso was nowhere near as quick as Vettel at the start of each of the stints, but he was always the quickest of the three cars More…

Each race we look in depth at the strategies and analyse the decisions taken in the heat of battle and sometimes we see teams and drivers taking big risks. We also see the part that luck can play in the outcome. Both are particularly true when you are trying to get a good result in Monaco. All the strategists know that there is a 71% chance of a safety car here and if it falls at the right time it can make your race – as it did this year for Sutil and Kobayashi. But if it falls at the More…

In Malaysia, observed Felipe Massa, there was “a lot of overtaking in the final laps. That is why the strategy is even more important now, in order to get the tyre change sequence just right, so that you can avoid finding yourself fighting for position in the last few laps, while dealing with tyres that are no longer at their best.” This weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix takes place on another track where the effects of KERS, the DRS wing and the tyre degradation will be transformative, as they were in Sepang. Interestingly, the FIA is considering single detection, double activation More…