The car updates that find tenths of a second are vast, seismic improvements, but that doesn’t stop everyone chasing down the infinitesimal advantages: those that find thousandths, rather than hundredths of a second in car performance, or improve reliability by a faction of a per cent, or simply make it easier for the crew to perform a pit-stop, or understand data on a display. The gain from these tasks may not even be measurable – but gain there is, and string a lot of them together, and you have just that little bit more… 

A few seasons back when Formula 1 cut an hour from the weekend practice schedule, teams had to prune their programmes, cutting out the experiments, tests and high-fuel laps deemed not absolutely crucial to the operation. One thing not reduced, however, was the number of practice pit-stops listed in the run plan.  

While the crew will practice at the factory and push a car out into the pit-lane at the track, there’s really no substitute for practicing with a real driver and the car coming hot into the box… but the pit-stop fine tuning goes beyond gaining familiarity with the car. 

As the car is wheeled back into the garage, chief mechanic Kari Lammenranta, running the stop, will relay a series of measurements to the respective race engineer, to be passed on to the driver. Scales painted on the box will be used for reference, allowing the team to see that the driver is, for example, 5cm left and 10cm short. 

Nailing a stop precisely on the marks is rare – but important. Halting the car directly in front of the guns, and letting the jacks sweep in and get on first time, cuts a tenth or two off the stop time, and that might make the difference when exiting the pits – but the bigger prize is that it cuts down on the likelihood for a bad stop. Requiring the gunners to shuffle and readjust increases the probability for a wheel to not go on right, to get a stuck nut or a dangerous release.  

The easier it is for the driver to hit the marks, the better the stop is likely to be – and so the positioning of the box is a very precise orientation. Each team’s box position is dictated pre-event by race control and marked accordingly on the pit-lane blueprint – but within the physical positioning, there is wiggle room for alignment. Our standard is to have a 300mm offset from rear to front, nose of the car pointing in towards the garage.  

“Having the box aligned like this makes it easier to get in, fine to get out,” says Kari. “The entry into the box is always the difficult bit, so we prioritise this rather than having the box aligned straight. If it was straight, the driver would have to loop in to hit the marks. That’s difficult – but particularly so if the pit-lane is tight with not much space between the teams.” 

While 300mm is the team’s standard offset, every pit-lane is different, and it isn’t unknown for the team to scrape-off their carefully laid-out box tape on a Friday evening and mark it out again.  

“Our standard layout is what we think is a good starting point, but pit-entry and exit is one of the questions the drivers are asked post-session in a debrief. If they think it’s not quite right, then we’ll move it,” says Kari. “We might go a little more than 300mm, but we can’t go too much further because point in too much towards the garage and eventually it will start hindering the exit, requiring quite a sharp turn to get back out into the fast lane.” 

The toughest races for aligning the pit-box to the drivers liking are the shortest pit-lanes, with the smallest gaps between garages. While Monaco is always on the list of tough stops, Zandvoort, likewise a very short lane, has greater complications. “The Netherlands is the hardest, even tougher than Monaco,” says Kari, an 18-year veteran of the pit-stop crew. “It has the added problem of a pronounced dip in the middle of the pit-lane. So, when the car turns in, first one wheel comes off the ground, and then when that touches down, the other one comes off. Hopefully that’ll be improved – because the driver has a difficult job without having to deal with that too.” 

The caveat for aligning the pit-box just so is the privilege of being Constructors’ Champions. At most circuits the teams are arrayed in championship order from the previous season, which means the World Champions are in the first set of team garages, with an unobstructed run into their box. For a standard stop, they have a clear run into their box, and can angle it straight, or perhaps even pointing slightly outwards.  

Of course, what F1 gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. When there’s a mass dive for the pit-lane (for instance, under an early race Safety Car), the car stopped in the first garage can spend quite a long time looking at traffic streaking past.  

Interested in finding out what other small details make a big difference in the world of Formula 1? Check out the rest of our 0.1% Solutions series below, including the impact of sticky tape.