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Hello! Normally I’d have this video a Talking Points video out shortly after Hungary but
a bit of a delay for -reasons- led me to using Hungary in a slightly different way
So today we’re going to look at building a race strategy in general and being
responsive under changeable conditions and how strategy can just go horribly
wrong. And we can use Hungary as an example. The Hungarian Grand Prix was interesting because
it FELT like a wet race, even though it really wasn’t, save for a bit of drizzle and some light
rain that really only affected the last couple of laps. The conditions were changing and unsure,
and teams were a little bit in the dark on the expected pace of the tyres and cars,
so we got that sprinkling of uncertainty that wet races tend to bring.
So we went into the race with the unusual situation of Red Bull being 10th and 11th on the
grid with Verstappen and Perez respectively. Max had a power issue in Q3 and Perez did not manage
to set a hot lap in the final, fastest part of Q2. In theory this was a big open goal for Ferrari who
should have grabbed the pole position. The general consensus is that in the wafer-thin
balance between Ferrari and Red Bull, the Ferrari car handles the corners faster,
whereas Red Bull edges it out on the straights. So at a low-power, wiggly,
cornertastic track like the Hungaroring, it looked like Ferrari could really edge out Red Bull.
But, George Russell stole a sneaky pole for Mercedes. And his team mate Hamilton could easily
have taken one of the front row slots himself but for a DRS failure. So he was out of position,
really, in 7th on the grid. More on him, later. Nonetheless, Ferrari still looked the fastest
package so seemed likely to steal the win and make some headway on Red Bull who’d
have to fight from rows 5 and 6. Horner said Max was aiming for 5th position in the race.
As usual, before the race, Pirelli released their analysis of what the best possible race
strategies might look like, based on the tyre data gathered across the weekend and before.
In this case, there were two clear strategies that seemed, in Pirelli’s words, as good as each other.
The first would see drivers starting on soft tyres, running a short stint into the late teens,
and then dividing the rest of the race into two medium stints. A two stopper.
The other strategy was a one-stopped across two stints, one on mediums
and a longer stint on the hards. We’ll just ignore these other two.
So this is what these two main stints look like and as we can see,
eventual race winner Max Verstappen did end up running a race to a very similar strategy, with
slightly earlier stops. But we’ll get to that. What we first need to talk about is why these
two strategies, labelled by Pirelli as ‘as quick as each other, remember,
were actually not as quick as each other at all. And that’s because of the weather.
Two things happened that made this weekend’s Hungarian GP unusual. Firstly it rained
several times across the Saturday, essentially resetting the track surface and making it ‘green’.
When we say the track is ‘green’, we mean it’s basically fresh, unused, not bedded in by cars
running across it. Across the weekend, F1 cars and often other support series, will practise,
qualify and race across several sessions before the actual grand prix on Sunday
As the cars run, they lay down rubber on the tarmac, particularly across the racing line,
and rubber tyres on a rubbered track is a lot grippier than tyres on a fresh, green track.
Anyway, when rain comes along it tends to lift a lot of this lovely rubbered in part
of the track so it all goes back to zero again. The second thing that made this weekend unusual
was how cold it was. It was at least ten degrees colder than normal, around
20 degrees ambient, instead of the normal 30 to 35 degrees for Budapest in late July.
The race in Hungary is usually HOT. A scorcher, you might say.
This time, it was extremely mild and this affects the tyres.
A refresher on the tyre compounds then. Very important when making strategies.
There are 5 compounds, with C1 being the hardest and C5 being the softest.
Now the softest tyres tend to be the quickest of the bunch, but work for the shortest amount
of time, degrading the quickest and shedding lap times faster than the harder compounds.
Conversely, the hardest compounds tend to be the slowest but are more robust,
holding their pace for longer, so you can do longer stints on the harder tyres.
So you can build a strategy around expected lap times across stints for different tyres,
adjust for the weight of the fuel, which goes down over time, and start to feel
out what might work best for you. So far so… well maybe not simple,
but all the pieces make sense. But then we’ve got the temperature issue.
Part of what makes the softer tyres grippy and… you know: soft, is that they are more squishy
and malleable. For an exaggerated idea of the compounds imagine the difference between chewing
on chewing gum and chewing on a pencil eraser. The soft compound is the chewing gum end of things.
So because the soft tyres are so malleable, they operate at a lower temperature range.
If they get too hot they start to degrade and the grip of the rubber drops dramatically.
This is why for most of this season the softest tyre at any given weekend has tended to be
used for quali and quali only. You can put in a really good single lap by pushing the tyres hard,
but then they start to get too hot and lose their peak performance. A great one lap tyre.
The hard tyres on the other hand really need to be worked into a useable, squishier state where
their grip really comes in. Their temperature range is much higher, to the point where it
can be really hard to overcook them at all. In previous seasons the hard tyres tended to
be heavily avoided because they were just too slow. Reliable and robust, but really
hard to get into a good performance zone. This year though, they’ve been great. Drivers
can get them to a good temperature and a good pace and keep that performance going
over a long stint without too much drop off. This year we’ve seen a LOT of race strategies
that just involve the medium and hard tyre. OK so back to Hungary and why this second strategy
from Pirelli ended up being pretty, pretty bad. And that’s all down to the hard tyre and the low
temperatures. The hard was really struggling to work here. At just 20 degrees and with
no particularly fast corners to generate a lot of work in the tyres and heat the rubber,
the hard tyres just weren’t able to get into a good performance range, as they
might have on a normal Hungarian summer day. So that’s why it’s odd looking at Leclerc’s
strategy, and really anyone who ended up trying the hards. Even before the race, the teams were
predicting the hards would be hot garbage. Or cold garbage, I guess. So why did anyone even try it?
The race started with a mixture of compounds. The Red Bulls started on the softs to make up
some good places in the opening laps. The Ferraris started on the mediums to go a bit longer in the
first stint, not unusual. George Russell started on softs and basically ran the Pirelli strategy,
like Verstappen. His teammate, starting further back, started on mediums.
But if you start on mediums, you’re going to have to use a different compound at some point.
Either the soft or the hard. That’s the rule. Leclerc started on the mediums,
but didn’t run particularly long on them. But that’s not very weird, the tyre wear is higher
at the start of the race when the cars are heavy with fuel and put more energy into the tyres.
He then switched to another set of mediums. Again, not weird. He was able to run good
pace on them to take the lead of the race from Russell in the second stint. Cool.
And the track was settling in nicely. There was threat of some rain and light
drizzle occasionally but nothing that really affected the track conditions.
But for some reason, Ferrari chose to make Leclerc’s second stint on mediums
very short, not running them at all to the length they could run,
which was an extraordinary position at it tied Ferrari’s hands. This was way too early to
switch to softs. They simply would not last the remaining 30 laps on any kind of pace.
But he needed to use a different compound. He’d only run mediums so far. So
hards it was. They’d go to the end at least. But, as predicted: they were cold garbage.
Leclerc used them for just 14 laps before making a very unwelcome third stop to switch over to
softs and try and salvage something. In this 14 lap stint on the hards,
Leclerc lost about 16 seconds to Verstappen, going from a gap of seven and half second ahead of Max,
to falling 8.4 seconds behind him, losing the lead and second place to Max and George.
And all this included Max having a spin of his own. Utter disaster.
Leclerc’s stop on lap 39 came straight after Verstappen’s on lap 38, as if
to make some ill-thought out attempt to cover the Red Bull, despite them being on completely
different strategies. Red Bull played it to the numbers, Ferrari kind of panicked and reacted,
putting themselves in a horrible position. Verstappen was on great pace all Sunday, don’t get
me wrong. I’d be panicked if I was Ferrari too, but you’d think Ferrari would be a steadier hand.
And clearly they learned immediately as they chose to stretch out Sainz’s middle stint to get him
far enough into the race to be able to run a final stint on softs. Much more pacey overall,
no third stop. He finished two places ahead. Mercedes too, stayed the course with Russell
running the Pirelli strategy and Hamilton essentially running the reverse Pirelli strategy -
a viable option as Pirelli say you don’t have to run them in the order given for it to work.
You can see from the lap times, Hamilton was overall the faster of the two Mercedes,
out pacing Russell when they were on the same compound through the middle of the race and really
using the softs to huge effect at the end of the race. You can see why Toto Wolff suggested a win
might have been on the cards had Hamilton had a normal qualifying session without the DRS Failure
Hamilton was on similar pace to Verstappen through the middle of the race, too, actually 3.6
seconds faster on the laps they shared between pit stops. And given how much pace he had at the end,
it’s not absurd to say a win was a possibility. He was running a Verstappen-paced race,
if you account for the compound differentiation. Alonso tried the Pirelli ‘As Quick As’ one-stopper
strategy and was kind of nowhere, saved only somewhat by not having to make a
second stop. He couldn’t really get any pace out of that hard tyre, which he ran for 48
miserable laps. But he only lost two places on his grid slot, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
The McLarens, too, went for a hard stint at the end, going soft, medium, hard on both cars.
They were able to make it work a bit better than Alonso did but like the Alpines,
and a couple of the other teams, they only had one set of medium tyres left for the race.
So they couldn’t run two medium stints and had to try and work the hards in somehow.
And it was just too cold for them. So what did this all come down to?
A little bit of a weather and temperature surprise for sure. And some teams made things difficult by
not leaving themselves enough medium tyres to cope with much colder conditions than anticipated.
AlphaTauri actually tried just throwing soft tyres at the problem to… mixed effect.
And it’s getting tiring making fun of Ferrari so… if they could just pull themselves together,
that would be nice. There’s only so many times you can make the same joke.
Speaking of which, I’m delighted to announce Oscar
Piastri will be joining this channel as co-presenter for the foreseeable…
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