In association with FxPro, and with key insight from Randy Singh, McLaren F1 Director, Strategy and Sporting, this is how our strategies played out at the end-of-season Arabian double-header.

Luck. It comes in two flavours – though it’s sometimes difficult to tell which one you’re tasting. Compete in Formula 1 – or trade forex - for long enough and the good luck balances out the bad luck but, on a case-by-case basis, it can often feel like a team is garlanded with serendipity… or just isn’t getting the rub of the green.

In the last third of the 2021 season, there’s a feeling about the team that the cards didn’t quite fall our way: collisions and punctures turned some promising positions into calamities; while the timing of red flags, Virtual Safety Cars and Safety Cars weren’t particularly helpful. Of course, it’s all part of racing: we bear a grudge against the times the luck went against us while conveniently forgetting the days when it helped. Except for the strategists. Just like the hundreds of thousands of global forex traders taking advantage of FxPro’s ability to execute an order in less than 14 milliseconds, strategists don’t use luck as a metric, sticking instead to probability, focusing on decisions rather than outcomes. At the end of a season that, after some incredible highs, has had something of a flat finish, the silver lining is that we’ve run some very good races, with effective strategies but haven’t been very lucky.

The race in numbers

	Lando Norris		Daniel Ricciardo
	Saudi Arabia	Abu Dhabi	Saudi Arabia	Abu Dhabi
Starting position	P7	P3	P11	P10
End of lap one	P6	P5	P9	P10
Finishing position	P10	P7	P5	P12
Speed trap	326.7km/h (12th fastest)	323.0km/h (13th fastest)	323.5km/h (14th)	327.0km/h (7th)
First pit-stop	20.937s	21.380s	-	21.449s
Second pit-stop	-	22.173s	-	22.056s
Fastest lap	1m31.914s (8th quickest)	1m31.914s (8th quickest)	1m32.716s (11th)	1m32.716s (11th)

 

The tyres at Jeddah

The tyres at Yas Marina

The Jeddah strategy… in theory

The new circuit in Jeddah was surprisingly grippy for freshly rolled asphalt but also had low degradation for a circuit of these speeds, primarily caused by the long, fast corners being sufficiently shallow to function more as tapering straights than genuine turns. With evening temperatures on the Red Sea coastline of Jeddah being relatively mild, the race was therefore heavily canted toward a single pit-stop.

For Lando, that was a tough proposition. A late switch to the Soft tyre allowed him to progress into Q3 on Saturday – but also meant he was the only driver obliged to start the race with a used Soft – and no one else did so voluntarily. His race would be tough: he had to get far enough on the Soft tyre to switch to the Hard at a point where that compound could last to the end of the race without leaving him vulnerable.

Starting P11, Daniel had a choice of compound and started on the Hard tyre. It was an unusual move for McLaren – but Daniel’s comparatively lowly qualifying slot was caused by the car collecting floor damage during qualifying. He had more pace than his position suggested, and by running long on the Hard, to be followed by a short, fast stint on the Medium, it was hoped he could regain lost ground.

The Jeddah strategy... explained

“Drivers often behave themselves at the first race when we go to a circuit that looks a little risky: the precedents are races like Sochi and Baku, where the first years are uneventful, even when the circuit itself encourages incidents,” says Randy. “That puts you in two minds: is the race likely to be eventful, because the track layout suggests it should be or is it going to be uneventful, because everyone’s going to be a little conservative? Obviously, the race was extremely eventful!”

The nature of the Jeddah Corniche Circuit made the probability of incidents very high, and two of these proved crucial in the outcome of the race. On lap 10, Mick Schumacher crashed into the barriers, bringing out the Safety Car. Lando took the opportunity of a cheap pit-stop to shed his Soft tyres a few laps earlier than anticipated, with a view to running a long stint on the Hard tyre to the flag. His prospects went from excellent to terrible when, unable to repair damaged barriers, Race Control upgraded the Safety Car to a red flag, locking-in positions by giving everyone else a free stop. Not having another Hard tyre in his allocation, Lando took both restarts on the Hard he had fitted under the Safety Car and, restarting first P14 and then last, battled his way back up to P10 without a further stop.

“Without the Safety Car, we’d have done our best to go further than we did with the Soft tyre, to give Lando a shorter stint on the Hard,” says Randy. “With the Safety Car, there’s always potential for a red flag to follow but we didn’t anticipate this happening in this instance, and so it was sensible for us to pit when we did. In simple terms, when following the Safety Car, each opportunity to pit that you pass up, makes your eventual stop more costly with the field bunching – though in this instance, the track going red almost immediately after Lando pitted ultimately penalised him heavily.”

Daniel may have been the beneficiary of the red flag… or not. It moved him up the order but, after a good start, he was in good shape to run long, and stick to his plan of a shorter second stint on the Medium tyre.

“We elected to start Daniel on the Hard compound to try to run a longer first stint. We thought there was more pace in the car than the starting position suggested, and it may have paid off very handsomely – but ultimately it was neutralised by the Safety Car and the red flag.”

Having started on the Hard, Daniel had little option at the red flag other than swap to a Medium tyre and attempt to nurse it to the flag. At the second red flag, he could have swapped to his eight-lap old used Medium from qualifying – but determined the one already on the car was still in better condition. Under other circumstances, the driver might have kept a second Hard tyre in reserve for this eventuality, but with only two in the standard allocation, and all the teams needing to explore tyre behaviour in practice, everyone chose to go into the race with just the one.

Daniel made a place at the first restart but eventually lost out to the quicker Valtteri Bottas towards the end of the race. Having not scored during the previous triple-header it was, however, a welcome return to form.

The Yas Marina strategy... in theory

The new layout at Yas Marina Circuit, with the previous 21-corner version replaced by a much quicker 16-corner lap, weakened the value of the circuit’s statistical provenance. At some venues, the impact of that would be limited but at Yas Marina, where the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix has traditionally been on the knife-edge between one and two stops, there was considerable potential for the changes to the track to push the race more firmly in one direction or the other without it being immediately apparent which.

“The tyres were the same as last year, but the cars were quicker, so that has an impact,” says Randy. “With the changes to the corners, you typically would expect the degradation to be at least as high as it used to be, if not higher, and coupled with the extra three laps for the shorter length, that should have swayed it towards two stops. However, what we saw through practice is tyre behaviour that suggested it would very firmly be a one-stop race, with all three compounds behaving very well, and with lower degradation than in previous years – though we’re still not quite sure why that was.”

The ideal situation would have been to qualify out of Q2 on a Medium, but with a one-stop Soft>Hard race possible, it wasn’t deemed essential. Daniel didn’t attempt it, Lando did but had to concede defeat and both drivers were to start the race on a Used Soft. The best strategy from there was to run those tyres as far as possible, clear as many backmarkers as possible and then switch to a new Hard tyre for the bulk of the race.

The Yas Marina strategy explained...

Both drivers had variations on the same themes at the start of the race. They had threats from behind in the form of cars starting outside the top 10 on Hard and Medium tyres likely to run longer opening stints. And both threats and opportunities with other top-10 runners starting the race with a used Soft tyre. Therefore, the intent was very much to be careful with the Soft and get a good way into the race before having to stop. Longevity was of greater value than pace, with the longer the cars could stay out, the more backmarkers they would clear before having to stop.

While Charles Leclerc and Esteban Ocon stopped on lap 15, the decision to pit Lando first and then Daniel, on lap 17 and 18 respectively, was not a move to cover but more a case of the tyre approaching its limit.

“Both stops were determined by getting towards the end of the tyre life,” says Randy. “We knew we weren’t going to be able to go much longer and were also looking at track position. It was a case of finding a good balance – but really most cars on that strategy got towards the upper end of how long you could run those tyres.”

Both drivers had to work their way back through the field, both overtaking on track and having cars pit off ahead. While Lando’s position was not immediately threatened, Daniel had to set a good pace to protect against the Hard-tyre starting Fernando Alonso and Pierre Gasly who were running deep into the race. Daniel had kept both within the pit window and would likely have had a tough end of the race defending – but the Virtual Safety Car allowed both a cheap stop, and they emerged ahead of him. “The timing of the VSC was quite unfortunate for Daniel’s race,” concludes Randy.

Lando was forced into a second stop from a promising position with a slow puncture which left him with very little ability to impact the closing laps of the race, but the late race Safety Car allowed Daniel to pit for a Soft tyre. Given he was outside the points anyway, the loss of two places was deemed a worthwhile gambit for a chance to attack with a much quicker tyre if the race went green again. Unfortunately for Daniel, the cars ahead of him were allowed to unlap themselves and he was not, thus leaving him a lap adrift of his rivals when the race resumed for one final lap… not that anyone beyond our pit-wall was looking at Daniel.

“We anticipated the race may restart for a lap and, because we weren’t in a great position with Daniel, we took a stop under the Safety Car,” explains Randy. “What we’d not built into our decisions was that Race Control might allow some cars to overtake but not others. Unfortunately, that meant Daniel, as one of the few cars that couldn’t overtake, was effectively penalised.”

…some you win, some you lose.

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