Monaco was a waiting game, with the ever-present threat of a shower colouring everything the team did from reconnaissance laps to an ultimately successful double-points finish at the chequered flag.

For anyone watching the 2023 Monaco Grand Prix on TV or from the grandstands, it’s possible they saw a race in two halves: a longer, largely static, first half, followed by a furious burst of activity when the rain came and turned the streets of the Principality slick with standing water and shrouded in spray.

For our race engineers and strategists, it wasn’t quite that way: the dry portion of the race featured a game of cat & mouse with AlphaTauri, followed by a slightly more straightforward run to the finish (though the drivers would certainly not see it that way) once the die was cast and the Inter tyres fitted.

At the end of the race, the team were happy with getting both cars home in the points, on an afternoon where doing so was far from a straightforward operation. In association with FxPro and with exclusive insight from McLaren F1 Director of Strategy and Sporting Randy Singh, here’s how it all unfolded…

The race in a nutshell

• Clean start, everyone down to P13 holds position. Lando P10, Oscar P11

• Lap 48, a few light spots of rain start to fall

• Lap 50, Lando boxes, switches from the Medium to the Hard tyre. He drops to P11, promoting Oscar to P10

• Lap 54, double shuffle, Oscar and Lando both pit for Inters, they hold positions P10 and P11

• Lap 58, Lando is quicker and the drivers swap positions

• Lap 67, Lando passes Yuki Tsunoda for P9 into Sainte Devote

• Lap 68, Oscar passes Tsunoda at the same spot for P10

The race in numbers

	Lando Norris	Oscar Piastri
Starting Position	P10	P11
End of First Lap	P10	P11
Finishing Position	P9	P10
Speed Trap	282.1km/h (18th fastest)	283.3km/h (14th)
First Pit-stop	24.663 (11th fastest)	25.851 (20th)
Second Pit-stop	33.428 (34th – double shuffle)
Fastest Lap	1:17.844 (19th)	1:17.513 (14th)

Lando’s compound strategy: New Medium>New Hard>New Inter

Oscar’s compound strategy: New Hard>New Inter

The strategy… In theory

Monaco is a one-stop race. Degradation is low and overtaking is virtually impossible, so track position is king… but within the confines of a one-stop, there are options available to the strategists.

Traditionally, the approach is for the front runners to start on a softer tyre, because a good launch off the line is the best form of attack and defence. Cars further back, or out-of-position, might opt for a harder tyre start to take advantage of circumstances to run long and gain places that way… but 2023 wasn’t like that.

There was a nebulous threat of rain lurking around Monaco, likely to thwart the best-laid plans, so everyone opted for longevity, eschewing the Soft tyre (except Zhou Guanyu) to give themselves greater flexibility to see how the weather would develop.

What really happened

Lando started on a Medium tyre with Oscar right behind him on Hards. They held position in P10 and P11 from the start, but field spread meant that, by the time the first spots of rain started to fall around two-thirds distance, Lando had fallen around five seconds behind Yuki Tsunoda in ninth, while Oscar had an advantage over Nyck De Vries of around 12 seconds.

With a few drops of rain falling, Lando pitted on Lap 50 for Hard tyres. Then, with rain falling a little harder, both cars stopped for Intermediate tyres on lap 54. Lando was quicker on the Inters and was able to catch Oscar, and the pair swapped positions. They then caught and passed Tsunoda, and went to the flag P9 and P10.

The strategy explained: Rain equals chaos

Sometimes, the threat of rain is a more potent strategic factor than rain itself. That proved to be the case in Monaco, with much of the field delaying their single pit-stop – irrespective of starting tyre – very deep into the race. It also influenced the choice of starting tyre.

“Both the threat of weather and the graining that we’d seen in practice contributed to the decision to not start the race with Soft tyres,” says Randy Singh, Director, Strategy & Sporting. “Because the run into the first corner is so short in Monaco, it’s not so penalising launching on a harder compound, so we didn’t see many downsides in starting on the Medium and the Hard.

“And there were good upsides by being able to run longer stints, both in the dry and also if you need to extend a stint to wait for rain. The reason we split the two strategies is that we’re picking for the team, rather than the individuals. With Oscar just behind Lando, splitting the cars made quite a lot of sense to us, providing more flexibility with strategy as the race went on.”

Lando suffered some graining on the Medium tyres throughout his first stint, which contributed to him being unable to keep pace with Tsunoda, and he dropped back, without ever really losing touch with the AlphaTauri ahead. With the two cars running in tandem, and with Oscar likely to run longer on the Hard tyre, there existed the potential for the team to perhaps delay Tsunoda after a stop, and thus Tsunoda wasn’t going to stop until after Lando.

“The first part of the race was…not simple,” says Randy. “There’s a lot going on, the drivers are managing graining and we’re constantly trying to assess what we want to do as a team. We wanted to beat Tsunoda but in the first stint he was quicker than us and there weren’t many opportunities to attack him. And equally, we didn't want to lose track position with cars behind – which in Monaco is crucial. So, we decided to build windows on the cars behind so we could pit into clean air. We extended and then extended again because there wasn’t a good reason to pit.”

Despite the first drops of rain falling, the team decided to bring Lando in for a Hard tyre on Lap 50. The weather fronts were all failing to make it over the mountains and the rain wasn’t expected to get worse. The very light sprinkling that did fall, however, was making the track a little slippery.

“We thought that the rain would be fairly transient and fairly light – but we thought some cars on older tyres might struggle, so we put Lando onto fresh tyres to avoid an incident, and improve his level of grip,” says Randy. “That said, while we thought more rain was a low probability, if we did get it wrong and the rain did intensify – which is what happened – we were only losing a position to Oscar, so from a team point of view, it was better to reduce the risk to Lando.

The heavier rain that followed didn’t come from a front but rather a shower formed spontaneously above the circuit. It was also oddly localised, at first hitting only the section of track around Loews Hairpin, before moving up to the Beau Rivage.  After that, both cars, along with the rest of the field, needed to stop for Intermediate tyres. Lando was the quicker on the green-banded Inters, and Oscar did not attempt to impede his team-mate as they both set off after Tsunoda.

“Both Lando and Oscar are fully bought into doing what’s right for the team and it was clear in this case to Oscar that Lando was approaching with quite a lot of pace and he gave way as the priority was to both catch and attack Yuki ahead.”

Once past the Japanese driver, Lando and Oscar had no real targets ahead or behind. The car did, however, show impressive pace on the Intermediate which, post-race, had the team wishing the rain had started a little earlier – and looking ahead thoughtfully to a mixed forecast for Barcelona.

The Quick Fix

While the closing stages of the Monaco Grand Prix were dramatic for everyone, we had our own individual moment of excitement during qualifying, when Lando hit the wall towards the end of FP2. He was able to bring the damaged car back to the pits, and had put an earlier time on the board good enough to qualify for Q3.

When something like this happens, the driver and engineering team are spectators, with the job of repairing the car being in the hands of the five mechanics forming the car’s core team, led by No.1 mechanic Kyle Moreira. The mechanics would usually change a track rod in around 45 minutes. On Saturday, they had to do it in 16…

“Before we do anything else, we do the normal things, which is get the fans in, wheels off and prep the car for the next run. Only after that do we assess the damage,” explains Kyle. “The front-left track rod was obviously broken – but we had to inspect the other three corners as well, because the car hit on both sides. Everything else looked okay – so then it was a case of taking off the nose box and drum to get at the steering column.

Give it up for our team today! 👏 A monumental effort to get Lando back on track in Q3. 🧡#MonacoGP 🇲🇨 pic.twitter.com/D8K1CmfGbE

— McLaren (@McLarenF1) May 27, 2023

“All five of us were working on it – and there really isn’t that much space, especially in Monaco, so it was quite cosy! It isn’t a job that we would practice doing against the clock, but back during car design, it was discussed, given the number of street circuits we go to now and the likelihood of this sort of damage occurring.

“It was a little unexpected that we were ready earlier than Will [Joseph – race engineer] wanted to leave the garage, which made everyone smile – but we used the extra minute to double-check everything.

“The garage was buzzing when Lando went out in Q3. We were very, very happy. Being able to get the car running again in Monaco gave everyone in the garage a big lift.”

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