Definitely don’t like it as a full time thing, especially as it seems to come from Pirelli absolutely screwing the pooch on tire selection/manufacture/both. From what I’ve gathered, it’s a lot like the race that led to Michelin no longer making tires for F1 (ETA: in effect, not necessarily cause). “Tires can only be used for 18 laps”, and the decision made AFTER everything but the race?
On top of that, that’s just a shit race. The racing itself was fantastic, but multiple drivers needing assistance to get out of their cars, other drivers opening their visors, at least one doing so on the track, and rumors of drivers passing out at the medical facility afterwards. Hell, Alonso was literally asking someone to dump water on him during a pit stop. If the tires and cars and drivers can’t handle the ridiculous heat of Qatar, maybe don’t race there. Some of the videos to come out of today are terrifying.
Verstappen raised a fair point, which is that it isn’t fair to take who design their cars to reduce tire wear. I seriously doubt that was a significant consideration in Red Bull’s setup - it seems to be a byproduct of having pace to spare - but it makes some sense.
I’m not quite able to parse that. Are you saying that the teams and designers bear some responsibility for the tire wear issue, and we shouldn’t solely blame Pirelli?
No. I’m saying some teams and designers may be better at dealing with tire wear than others. Some cars inherently put more stress on the tires (generally because they rely more on mechanical grip than aerodynamic grip). But the point is that requiring every team to stop for tires the same number of times could be unfair to teams who optimize their cars to protect the tires.
Let’s say Red Bull had deliberately designed a more draggy car because they wanted extra downforce in order to ensure good tire life. Requiring them to stop every 17 laps would take away an advantage that they designed into their car - it’s not their fault if everyone else is going through tires more quickly.
In real life, we know that the Red Bull is not a draggy car; it’s faster on the straights than everything but the Williams. Mercedes had excellent tire wear in its dominant years - I recall Lewis once making a set of hards last virtually an entire race - but I believe that is because they didn’t have to push the tires as hard because they were already faster than everyone else. But Red Bull’s current car could have been designed to protect its tires and thereby given up other potential optimizations such as straight-line speed.
As an American, I probably pay a little more attention to Haas than their results would deserve. So far this season (and last season too, I think) their tire wear has been terrible. Late in races, their performance would drop off and they’d lose places. On one of the race broadcasts, I heard David Croft (I think) say that they would be introducing some improvements at the Austin race intended to improve that.
So yes, designing a car that prolongs the performance of its tires is an advantage that some teams can exploit, and always has been. This last race was different, though. I got the impression that there was a risk that as the tires aged, they would not just lose performance, but actually fail. Hence the 18-lap limit.
I’m not sure that Verstappen’s complaint is legitimate. At most tracks, it’s the running surface of the tire that limits its useful life. Suppose that at Qatar, the Pirelli engineers were seeing unexpected stress in the sidewalls of its tires. A team like Haas may have changed their tires early as the performance diminished. A team like Red Bull may taken advantage of their longer tire life and left their cars out until the sidewall failed.
Since this was an unprecedented rule, it was probably done to address an unprecedented cause. If that’s the case, I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from other, normal races.
Ah, okay. I agree that it wouldn’t be fair to introduce that rule now; it would penalize those teams who designed their cars for long tire life.
It could be introduced with the next generation of cars, whenever that is. Rather than design for long tire life, the teams would be confronted with the challenge of extracting the maximum performance from their tires over their 18-lap lifespan (or whatever the limit was at different tracks). I still don’t like the idea; think it would take out a lot of the strategic decisions that teams have to make during a race. But it would be fair.
It would be interesting to be privy to the conversations that go into the rules and design specs that take place in Formula 1. I’ve heard criticisms that the current car is quite large, for example. I wonder if there might be more passing if the cars were a little smaller. Might be slower, though. Maybe the F1 brain trust is worried that they’d lose fans if a new car was slower than the old one.
New rules produce slower cars almost by definition, since rule changes are usually (though not always) adopted with the goal of slowing cars for safety. But in any event, it always takes a while for teams to figure out how to design a car to maximize performance under new regulations. Lap times increased by 2-5 seconds between 2013 and 2014 (the end of the V8 era and the beginning of the hybrid era). The current regulations increased lap times by 2-3 seconds from 2021 to 2022. F1 fans know that F1 cars are quicker around anything short of an oval than any other racing formula, so they don’t much care about regulations slowing cars down. (They do seem to care a lot about regulations ruining engine noise, which I don’t understand at all.)
I agree that maximum tyre usage should not be adopted, however I would like to see an exception made for Monaco. They need to do something to energise that race as it’s usually a dull procession.
I don’t think the mandatory 3 pit stops changed anything about this race, and while any pit stop is an opportunity for randomness (pit stop goes wrong, car comes out in traffic, etc), allowing the drivers to “push” for an entire race entirely negates the randomness that was introduced with the “designed to degrade” Pirellis.
Joker laps are probably a better solution than forcing an extra pit stop. Strategists can put cars out of order for strategic benefit without wasting a set of tires.
Is there any discussion about regularly putting a maximum on number of laps on a set of tires? I’ve been under the impression this was a single-time issue due to the track and conditions.
Monaco is going to be a trash race until F1 cars are 2/3 the size. Smaller series like Formula E seem to have decent racing there. F1 cars are just too big. That’s been a Saturday watch for me and ignoring the race on Sunday.
Aside from a few “journalists’” musing about such a thing, I’ve not read anything anywhere that says the FIA or any teams are talking about such a thing.
My theory is he was pissed about the tires he had, knew he was in for a shit race and decided to take it out on the team and sit out the hot drudgery that was coming.
Pretty sure he and Sainz had the best day, because they didn’t have to almost die in the race itself.
That said, it’s pretty clear from onboards he thought he was clear of Russell, and Russell didn’t expect him to come in that aggressively (nor did he have anywhere to go anyway). It’s a T1 oopsy magnified by it happening to teammates. Also gave George the chance to pull out one of the more impressive drives of the year. Fourth place in a race where you have to take an extra pit stop and everyone’s just running qualy lap after qualy lap is some serious pace.
I don’t think he could have known that George and Max were going to be side by side. It appeared pretty clear that George would be following Max through turn one but Matt took a very odd line (not that he did anything wrong, it was just an unusual line).
Watching the qualifying just now, and I thought of a question. Is there a reason why pit lane has to span the start/finish line? It’s traditional, and probably makes for a better spectator experience in the main grandstand, but is there anything else?
The way F1 does qualifying, there’s always the potential for interference between cars that are on their flying lap and cars on their warmup or cool-down laps. Suppose you built a track where the pit entrance was a couple hundred yards past the start finish line. During qualifying cars could do a warmup lap (shortened by those couple hundred yards), then their flying lap, then immediately into the pits. Without the cool-down lap, there would be fewer slow cars to get in the way.
Is there a reason for the cool-down lap other than just having to circle the track to get to the pit entrance? Do the brakes, or anything else, need that cooling that they couldn’t just get in the pits with coolers blowing in the brake ducts?
I suppose that rather than re-position the start/finish line, they could just define a new line on the track, somewhere before pit in, and use that for the timing line during qualifying. A lap is a lap; from any point on the track, to that same point, could be used to set a qualifying time. Would the spectators during qualifying feel they were missing something if the timing line wasn’t right in front of them?
