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Sometimes it’s good to cover the basics, the every day things. And a question I was
asked about unlapping made me think… let’s go over blue flags. Why they’re used, what
the consequences are, and all the ramifications, good and bad, from the systems we have in
place to manage lapped traffic. So naturally during a race, you’ve got the
fast cars at the front and the slower cars at the back. And all the cars go round and
round completing laps - blah, blah, blah you know where this is going.
Eventually, the leader of the race, due to such a high relative speed, will have come
right around behind the slowest car in the race and be in a position to pass them on
track, at which point the leader will be over a lap ahead of this ‘lapped’ car.
Now these cars that are due to be lapped, they may not realise the cars coming up behind
them are lapping them rather than fighting for position. In fact, their mirrors are small
and these drivers are mostly concentrating on their own race
So blue flags are shown to drivers to let them know there’s a faster car coming up
behind them. In fact that’s the general meaning of the
blue flags and blue lights shown to the drivers - be aware of faster traffic coming up on
you. If we check the FIA’s International Sporting
Code, buried in Appendix H, we find three main reasons to show a driver a blue flag
If a driver is leaving the pit lane and fast traffic is ploughing down the main straight
- this is to warn the driver to exercise caution rejoining the track.
During practice sessions, a flag is shown if a driver is on a slow lap but a car on
a faster lap is approaching them. Practice sessions are often troubled with drivers on
different runs getting in each other’s way, so the blue flag warns a driver to make space
for a car on a fast stint. And, as we mentioned - during the race the
blue flag warns a driver that a faster car a lap ahead of them is approaching and that
the driver to be lapped should allow the following car to pass at the earliest opportunity.
Now, the idea here is that the two drivers in this situation are not in the same race,
are not fighting for position and so shouldn’t interfere with each other, but it’s interesting
that the onus is on the car being lapped to yield to the passing car.
At first glance it feels fair enough - the backmarker is in the way of the race leader.
But what about the lapped car? Is their race not important? They’re still trying to get
the maximum out of their race. They might not be aiming for podium positions but they
might still be after points or whatever position they can get in the teens.
Drivers at the back and through the midfield might lose 2, 3, 4 plus seconds letting through
cars from the top end by moving out of the way, taking to the dirty parts of the track,
slowing down more than they want to. This completely stalls their progress, particularly
if they are in a pushing part of their stint, hoping to leapfrog whoever their competition
is. Midfield drivers have a hammertime too. Leading drivers may complain about blue flags
not getting cars out of the way fast enough, but these ARE other racing drivers, not random
street traffic. Lapped cars are constantly having their momentum and strategy ruined
by entitled leaders demanding track space as soon as they click their fingers.
There is a conflict here and while I understand the plight of the leaders, the rest of the
field can’t have their races ignored. Especially when they’re often the only ones in a real
fight on a given sunday. The rules as written are pretty vague, to
be honest. They just say lapped cars should let leaders by at the earliest opportunity
and the blue flag being shown seems to be just a way to gives slower cars a heads up
that a faster car will want to get past soon, rather than a demand that they jump aside.
Nonetheless, the working rule in use is that lapped cars should be out of the overtaking
car’s way by the time they pass three blue flags.
There are marshall posts stationed all around the track and each will signal to the driver
as they pass, so passing three blue flags without yielding normally means trouble.
This three-flag rule is an unwritten one though. You won’t find it in the International Sporting
Code or in the Sporting regulations. Instead it is more of an agreed metric for what constitutes
‘ignoring blue flags’ and is not what is used in all FIA series or indeed in the
history of Formula 1. Before 1995, blue flags WERE used more in
the ‘giving awareness’ capacity to the drivers about to be lapped.
In the same way that a drivers today won’t want to fight another car on track if they
know them to be on a completely different strategy - fighting for position slows both
cars down, after all - blue flags gave drivers the information that there was no need to
fight the upcoming leader and they’d know it was quicker to let them past at their earliest
convenience than resist stubbornly. If the car in your mirrors is not one you’re
fighting with for position, then it’s not in your interest to lose time holding them
back. For the leading drivers, lapping cars was
just a part of the race and they did no expect backmarkers to leap out of their way but nor
did they expect to have to fight wheel to wheel with them.
Would they have preferred them to defer to their might immediately? Sure. But they didn’t
expect it. And if they could force an overtake sooner than the backmarker considered ‘convenient’
they would. The blue flag rule was then given a clarification
in 1995 with lapped cars now obliged to yield to overtaking leaders, as they do now. But
I can’t help but think there was some merit in the previous system and it’s telling
that many racing series are less gungho with their blue flag rules.
I still find no massively compelling reason why a driver should compromise their own race
by slowing down or going off line, just because a far superior car in their own race demands
that part of the track. Send the Mercedes onto the dirty part, they’re already fast
enough. Now, lapped cars - once lapped - don’t have
to stay lapped. If they find themselves faster than the car that’s lapped them then they
CAN re-overtake them and unlap themselves. But of course they have to be significantly
fast enough to overtake them and race off ahead of them without getting in the way again.
The rule of thumbs for getting blue flagged in the first place is around a one second
window. If the leading car is one second behind you, you’ll get blue flagged as that is
a reasonable distance to expect you to yield without ruining your race completely.
So if you unlap yourself you should be able to pull out of that one second window and
maintain or increase that gap. For that to happen, the backmarker unlapping themselves
would normally have to be on a fresher tyre and a different strategy from the leading
car. As soon as you have been lapped, the timing
stops displaying your actual gap to the leader and instead shows you as +1 lap, +2 lap, etc,
behind, depending on how many times the leading driver has passed you.
This means that, if the leader is on lap 61, you are only racing on lap 60 or 59 or 58,
etc. And if the race is 61 laps long, as soon as
the leader completes lap 61, everyone who completes their current lap finishes the race.
So if you’ve been lapped twice, you will only have completed 59 laps of a 61 lap race,
and no more. Now while I lamented a little on backmarkers
having to leap out of the way and it not being their fault if they were in the way of the
leaders… I DO have sympathy for the system that allows backmarkers to unlap themselves
under the safety car. Though I know it drives some people up the wall.
If a Safety Car is called, once the train has formed behind it, some lapped cars may
end up positioned between the leading cars. This can be due to differing strategies in
play or a variety in choices on whether or not to pit when the safety car was called
or just the way the cars were spread during the race.
Either way, it creates a bit of a problem. When a safety car is called it brings the
excitement of bunching the pack back together again. Where leading cars might have pulled
a gap, now their contenders have another shot at overtaking them on track.
This can often liven up a race, particularly if one cars looked to have everything under
control and it brings the audience back to the edges of their seats knowing the race
win is back up for grabs. However, with a bunch of lapped cars in the
way, this kind of puts gum in the works of the potential battle for the leading positions
as drivers stuck behind them won’t be able to make their move at the restart.
On top of that, the backmarkers were screwed also. Now right in front of the whole unlapped
pack, they’d spend the next five or so laps losing huge amounts of time letting the whole
field through being almost constantly blue flagged and in no position to concentrate
on their own race. So a new system was brought in where, before
the race was restarted, the lapped cars in the train would unlap themselves and make
their way all the way around and back to the back of the train again. Well out of the the
way. The problem here is that this takes a long
time and adds on a couple of neutralised laps instead of allowing the race proper to continue.
Of course we do need them to get far enough ahead of the train so they aren’t quickly
right in the line of fire again but sometimes we do wait far too long and perhaps we just
need to release them a little earlier in the process to allow them to safely and carefully
make their way around the circuit. Of course, we shouldn’t just drop them back
through the field as that’s unfair in itself - they’ll lose out majorly through no fault
of their own in that case. So, when it comes to lapping, unlapping and
blue flags there’s no ideal solution. When mixing together cars driving in completely
different races, there’s no way to make everyone 100% happy but for the most part
things go pretty smoothly. Until they don’t.