Strategy debrief – presented by FxPro
You don't need more than one stop for a compelling strategic battle
With the party well and truly started in the Foro Sol, the paddock at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez got on with the rather more mundane activities of pack-down. Amid the competing bass of Martin Garrix in the arena and two-stroke forklifts screaming around the pit-lane, the drivers did their final media pen of the weekend.
Both Lando and Daniel called it a good race: though Daniel did it with a much wider grin. Despite starting on the same tyre, and running close together in the opening stint, we went with very different strategies for Lando and Daniel in Mexico.
Lando pitted early, ran the regulation Medium>Hard strategy to come home ninth, Daniel went long and late, swapping his Medium tyre for a Soft, and finished his race with an exuberant charge through the field to finish seventh.
In the words of Randy Singh, Director, Strategy and Sporting: “There was a lot going on, and not everything went to expectations either. That always makes it more complicated… but also a bit more fun.”
Taken in isolation, it’s tempting to say that Daniel had the better of the two strategies – but the reality is that other approaches may well have left both drivers worse off. Mexico 2022 was an unusual race.
In association with FxPro and with insight from McLaren F1 Director of Strategy and Sporting Randy Singh, we'll explain the key decisions, why they were made, and their impact on the race...
The race in a nutshell
• Poor starts for both drivers on the Medium tyre. Lando drops from P8 to P10, Daniel from P11 to P13, then passes Zhou Guanyu for P12 on lap 9
• Lando pits on Lap 31 to cover Yuki Tsunoda, taking the Hard tyre
• Daniel runs long, pitting on Lap 44 for a Soft tyre, emerges in P13
• Lap 50 Daniel collides with Tsunoda, taking P11, receives a 10s penalty
• Lap 55 Lando and Daniel make a tactical position switch
• Daniel passes Bottas, Ocon and Alonso for P7, then builds a 12.2s gap to Ocon, to hold the position at the flag. Lando finishes P9
The race in numbers
Lando Norris | Daniel Ricciardo | |
Starting position | P8 | P11 |
End of first lap | P10 | P13 |
Finishing position | P9 | P7 |
Speed trap | 356.0km/h (2nd fastest) | 353.8km/h (4th) |
Pit-stop stationary time | 2.29s (2nd) | 1.98s (1st) |
Fastest lap | 1:23.402 (17th quickest) | 1:22.022 (3rd) |
The tyres
The strategy… in theory
Some days the best strategy is crystal clear, other days… well, you pay your money, you take your choice. The Mexico City Grand Prix was always going to be a tricky one to call, but the task was made more difficult by FP2 on Friday afternoon – traditionally, the session teams use as their primary source of long-run data – being abandoned in favour of a (holistically important, locally irrelevant) 2023 tyre test.
Pirelli thought the fastest race would be a two-stop – but they’re generally more conservative than the teams – even the one-stop offered a range of options, with all three compounds in play – and in any combination.
Most cars, ours included, were very concerned about temperatures, and were unwilling to exert sustained pressure, preferring to drop back from the car in front to improve airflow. Despite the Medium tyre holding up well, Lando was compelled to box on Lap 31 to retain track position over Tsunoda.
He fitted the Hard tyre with the intention of going to the end. Daniel went much longer on his Medium tyre, getting far enough into the race to be able to stop for a Soft tyre on lap 44 – he was the penultimate car to stop (Zhou went to 45).
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The strategy explained...
The Medium compound was the preferred starting choice for 12 of the 20 cars, including Lando and Daniel, with the other eight starting on a Soft tyre. “We thought the Medium was the right tyre to start on, because it gave us some flexibility,” says Randy.
“We could do a short stint and pit onto the Hard, or we could do a long stint, and pit onto the Soft. We thought starting on the Hard would be difficult because you can lose a lot of positions, and we thought the Soft would be a more useful tyre at the end of the race.”
After dropping places at the start, the drivers found themselves in a long train of midfield cars, most of which were on the same Medium tyre. Given the dangers of overheating brakes and power units, there were few attempted overtaking moves, with everyone content to run with a reasonable gap for cooling purposes, allowing the strategies to play out.
Tsunoda, one of the few Soft tyre starters in this group began to struggle with his tyres. Running behind Lando, he pitted on Lap 29 for a Medium and was immediately quicker, forcing Lando to box two laps later to prevent the undercut. Daniel, however, running behind Tsunoda, didn’t need to cover.
“We boxed Lando to cover Tsunoda, and it pulled the cars in from in front of Lando as well – at which point it becomes a pretty simple choice to have Daniel extend.”
After Lando’s stop, the cascade to cover became a strictly regimented affair as positions came under threat. Ocon boxes on Lap 33 from eighth, Bottas on lap 39 from eighth and Alonso on Lap 40 from seventh. In effect, this clears a path for Daniel, who advances as high as seventh before his stop on Lap 44. At this point, there’s hard data that the Soft tyre is more than capable of completing the distance with good pace. Daniel has 27 laps to run. Sainz, Leclerc and Vettel, all of whom started on a Soft tyre, had managed 29, 28 and 38 laps respectively.
Nevertheless, Daniel is eager to make gains while the tyre is at its best, and on Lap 50, collided with Tsunoda while making a pass for P11. He gets through – but picks up a 10s penalty for his efforts. The car is OK, however, and as he’s lapping a second quicker than Lando, the team asks Lando to move aside, to let Daniel attack the cars ahead, to ensure the best outcome for the team.
Lando complies, and Daniel uses his younger, faster tyres to successfully track down and pass Bottas, Alonso and Ocon. He has P7 on the road by Lap 61, but needs to keep pushing to build a 10-second gap over Ocon to retain the place after his penalty is applied.
With Daniel banging in a sequence of qualifying-pace laps (minus the engine mode), his big concern is twofold: being able to make the gap on Ocon, but also the threat of being lapped by Russell.
Moving off the racing line for Russell would mean picking up dirt on the tyres, costing him seconds that he can't afford. He also loses valuable time when a Virtual Safety Car is deployed on Lap 65 to remove Alonso's stricken car. Daniel gets the gap up to 10.6s at the end of Lap 68.
Now his main threat is Russell, who is two seconds behind, however, the Mercedes boxes for Soft tyres and an attempt at the fastest lap, meaning that Daniel is in the clear. He eventually crosses the line 12.19s ahead of the Alpine – more than the required advantage.
Lando comes home ninth, four seconds behind Ocon after a relatively sedentary second stint on a Hard tyre with which he was not particularly enamoured – but the team is very happy with the result.
So, what does this tell us?
The first car home on a two-stop strategy in Mexico was Stroll in 15th. The 14 cars ahead of him all ran the one-stopper – but with a reasonably even split across the Soft>Medium, Medium>Hard and Medium>Soft variations.
Strategists aren’t finished with a grand prix on Sunday evening, and over the next few days, the Mexico City Grand Prix will be in for some fairly intense deconstruction and analysis.
The benefit of hindsight and a lot of number crunching will deliver an answer – rarely definitive – as to what was the best strategy at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez – but that optimum strategy doesn’t necessarily produce an optimum result. It might, in reality, do the opposite.
“I think if we ran the race again tomorrow, teams would gravitate towards a Soft>Medium or Medium>Soft strategy as the quickest race – but that doesn’t mean it’d be the right strategy for every car in the race,” adds Randy.
“Daniel’s strategy worked really well – but if we’d done the same with Lando, it probably wouldn’t have helped him – and may have hurt Daniel. If we’d let Tsunoda undercut us, and gone long with Lando, then the cars in front of Lando would also have gone long, instead of boxing to cover Lando.
"It ends up quite… weird! It’s the back car in the pack – Daniel in this case – that benefits from being able to deviate from the cars in front. Further up that midfield pack, Lando doesn’t have that luxury, and nor do the cars around him. We didn’t split the cars from a desire to hedge our bets, but because a split became the natural thing to do once the cars in front of Daniel had boxed.
“Had we done it the other way around – gone earlier with Daniel, gone longer with Lando – it probably would have led to a worse result for both. Equally, if we tried to go long with both, it would probably have been a worse result. I would say that the way it played out probably maximised the points we scored as a team – though this wasn’t clear cut at the time.”
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