The German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring featured three drivers in different cars closely matched on performance. As the winner Lewis Hamilton observed, it was all about being perfect and not making mistakes and this was as true of the strategists and the pit crews as it was of the drivers.
In the end it came down to some inspired driving and finely balanced strategy calls. But further down the field we saw some varying strategies making a difference to the race result, particularly in the case of Adrian Sutil, who finished sixth ahead of the Mercedes and Renaults.
The key consideration in deciding the strategy in Germany was the performance on the slower medium tyre. If you were getting a difference between the soft and medium tyre of around 1.5 seconds then two stops was the way to go. If the gap was larger then three stops would be the answer with a short final stint on the medium tyre.
Tyre life turned out to be better than expected in Friday practice, so for many teams two stops looked a good option. But then heavy rain on Saturday night cleaned the track and that might have pushed some people towards three stops in the race believing that the track was very green. In the Bridgestone days this would have led to tyre graining, but that didn’t happen with the Pirellis in Germany. Instead what happened was that the track had less grip so the lap times were slower and this took less life out of the tyres, but the green surface didn’t damage them.
The battle at the front
Bearing all of this in mind, even the three-stoppers at the front ran almost a two-stop race in terms of stint lengths. Webber for example, did 26 laps on his third set of soft tyres. They didn’t want to put on the prime tyre, so they stopped as late as possible. Two cars pushed it to the extreme – Vettel and Massa – they pitted for medium tyres on the penultimate lap!
Among the leading trio Webber, who lost the lead to Hamilton at the start, was able to undercut Hamilton at the first stop by pitting first on lap 14. Webber was 0.5s behind the leader Hamilton when he made the stop. A very fast turnaround by the Red Bull crew, plus two very aggressive out-laps by Webber got him into the lead. He pushed hard to open a gap but Hamilton was faster in sectors one and three and Webber knew then that it wasn’t going to be his day.
Having pushed his tyres too hard early on, Webber’s pace wasn’t good at the end of the second stint. He tried the undercut again, but it didn’t work out. Hamilton and Alonso, on option tyres that were two laps younger, were able to increase their pace when Webber pitted. Webber’s second stop was 0.8s slower than his first stop and the end result was that he was down to third.
As for Hamilton and Alonso, they came in together for the first stop but Hamilton pitted a lap earlier second time around. Alonso’s in lap was 0.7s faster than Hamilton’s and the pit stop was 0.4s faster. What was interesting was that Hamilton’s out lap on fresher tyres hadn’t been significantly faster than Alonso’s on worn tyres, which defies the principal of the early stopper having the advantage.
Alonso came out of the pits in front but the Ferrari’s weakness in not warming the tyres up straight away meant Hamilton was able to pass him in Turn 2. So the strategy had worked for Ferrari on paper, but not in reality.
Webber had managed the undercut at the first stop but stopping first didn’t work for either Webber or Hamilton at the second stop. This can partly be explained by the damage the extra duel weight does to the tyre in the first stint, which diminishes by the time of the second stop and by the durability of the Pirelli soft tyre.
As for the timing of the final stop to the slower medium tyre, that was all about looking for evidence and it came in the form of Vitaly Petrov and Kamui Kobayashi. Maldonado had gone to the medium early on lap 35 but his lap times were inconsistent. When Petrov went to mediums on lap 46 and started setting personal best sector times on his second lap on the tyres, and Kobayashi went faster than his team mate who was still on old soft tyres, it was clear to McLaren that the time had come to take the medium tyre.
Webber was out of the picture by now, 8 seconds behind second place Alonso. McLaren pitted Hamilton on lap 51, but Ferrari did not react, leaving Alonso out there for two more laps, Ferrari was more concerned about its pace on the harder tyre. Hamilton’s pace was good straight away on the medium and the race was in the bag. Webber tried to stay out longer and jump them but he was coming from too far back and he couldn’t get close.
Sutil vs Rosberg
One of the highlights of the race was the performance of Force India with Adrian Sutil. He put together a perfect weekend and the strategy team got it just right. The result was he finished in sixth place, ahead of both Mercedes. He qualified 8th, two places and 0.8sec behind Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes. To beat him from there is quite an achievement.
Sutil vs Rosberg was a good example of two stops working out better than three. Force India were one of the teams for whom the simulator said that two stops was as fast as three and with one less stop to make there was less risk of losing time in traffic or with a poor stop.
Sutil stopped on laps 22 and 48, Rosberg on laps 14, 36 and 53. Their lap times were pretty similar in the first stint, but thereafter Sutil had the measure of him. The Mercedes is heavier on its tyres and Sutil closed the gap to Rosberg from four seconds down to nothing by the time Rosberg made his first of three stops. The Mercedes is a faster car, as was proven in qualifying, but their hands were tied by the heavy tyre use and Force India were able to beat them with 10 seconds to spare at the end.
Sutil was very impressive all weekend and he managed to find good consistency from the medium tyre. He was straight onto the pace after he went to mediums and set his fastest lap of the race when they were nine laps old. Many teams found it hard to get temperature into the medium tyre in the cool temperatures.
Getting the fuel load right
The possibility of rain on race day had quite an influence on fuel strategy in this race. A lot of people under-fuelled their cars in the belief that it would rain and that forced a lot of people to save fuel late in the race. That’s why Alonso eventually finished four seconds behind Hamilton, before then running out of fuel on the slow-down lap.
After making that mistake and under-fuelling Hamilton at Silverstone, McLaren didn’t make the same mistake twice!
(The UBS Strategy Report is produced with input and data from the strategists of several F1 teams.)
Race History Graph
Below is a graph showing the race history. It shows each car and the time delta between them and the race leader. So the laptime is encapsulated in it, but it also shows progress at different stages during the race because a cars slope will change if it goes faster or slower. You can also see when someone is clearly being held up in traffic.
The zero line is simply the race winners’ average lap time (total race time divided by the number of race laps). This is why his curve can go above the line if he’s lapping faster than his average, and below the line if he’s slower than his average or doing a pitstop.
Re-printed from James Allen on F1 - The official website
LAP TIMES GRAPH
This was a very interesting race from a strategy point of view, there were a lot more unknowns than normal, particularly with the tyres, as there was so little dry running before the race. And then there was the partially wet track at the start, which forced everyone to start on intermediate tyres, but how long for?
Prior to the start most strategists were thinking of a three stop race, with some further back on the grid planning to do one less stop to try to make up places.
The wet start meant two things which made life easier; drivers would not have to use both types of dry tyre so the much slower hard tyre did not have to be used and the wet start, essentially shortened the race by 11 laps and made the race simpler and the strategies easier to achieve.
The first key decision was how early to come in for dry tyres.
This decision was helped by Michael Schumacher who was forced to pit for a new nose on lap 9 and went to dry tyres, as he had nothing to lose. By lap 11, when his tyres were up to temperature, he was a second a lap faster than the leader and it was clear that slicks were faster and drivers like Jenson Button dived into the pits.
Red Bull: coping with two competitive drivers
At the point of wet to dry changeover, Sebastian Vettel had an eight second lead over Mark Webber, who was under pressure from Fernando Alonso. Using this to their advantage, Red Bull pitted Webber first so he would not lose time or a place to Alonso. It worked, but keeping Vettel out for the extra lap cost him five seconds. So the team was definitely thinking of Webber’s needs when it made the call on the order at the first stop.
However at the second stop they inadvertently cost Webber the place to Alonso. They did their usual thing of pulling the driver in just before the tyre performance drops off a cliff and Webber pitted on lap 26. Alonso still had life in his tyres however and did a 1m 35.5 which was the fastest lap of the race to that point. That and Webber losing a second and a half in his own pit stop meant that Alonso had done enough to undercut him. But then when Vettel’s stop went wrong and he lost the lead to Alonso, the German came out in Webber’s path, preventing him from attacking Alonso on tyres that were up to temperature.
This was a very rare example in 2011 of a driver undercutting a rival by stopping a lap later; normally new tyre performance means the undercut can only be achieved by stopping first.
McLaren – race compromised on several fronts
Leaving aside the extraordinary situation where Jenson Button’s wheel wasn’t attached at his third pit stop, McLaren’s race strategy was compromised. Like in Valencia the car was very hard on its tyres relative to the opposition. But the worse problem for Lewis Hamilton was that he didn’t have enough fuel.
With engine mapping changed for this race – meaning less fuel needed because they were not using it to off-throttle blow the diffuser – and no real dry running in practice, team strategists were really estimating the amount of fuel that would be needed to complete the race. Starting 10th McLaren clearly went over aggressive on Hamilton’s strategy. Normally you need around 150 kilos of fuel to do 52 racing laps of Silverstone.
The wet opening 11 laps should have played into his hands, because you use less fuel in the wet and many strategists took fuel out when they saw that the race start would be wet. But surprisingly it didn’t help Hamilton and he was still forced to save fuel in the last 20 laps, which cost him a podium place to Webber and almost cost him another to Massa.
This is one of the big challenges for race strategists; they want the car to finish with the minimum amount of fuel, because any extra weight you carry for 52 laps slows you down. If you are too aggressive it loses you a lot of positions when you are forced to slow at the end. If you put too much into the car, it will make you slower in the opening part of the race, but you won’t lose positions from it.
We’ve seen very little of this in the last 12 months, which indicates that teams don’t feel that being super-aggressive on fuel load is a worthwhile risk.
From back to front again for Alguersuari
This year we are seeing a phenomenon which we haven’t seen before in F1 strategy; in six of the nine races so far, a driver who is eliminated in Q1 is able to come through and score points. Alguersuari has now done it three races in a row from 18th place on the grid.
Toro Rosso’s official word was that they were caught out by the rain at the end of Q1 and didn’t get a lap in on soft tyres, but I’ve been told that they went for a hard tyre run only in order to save three sets of soft tyres for race day, as it’s worked for them in the past.
At any rate, Algersuari drove his customary long stints, taking advantage of the extra life and performance of new soft tyres to stop only twice and finish 10th.
Nico Rosberg and Sergio Perez were the highest placed two stoppers in sixth and seventh places.
The importance of the start in race strategy
Rosberg lost three places at the start and did well to come through to finish where he would have done without that initial setback.
But we are seeing some trends in starts this year, which are making a difference to drivers’ results.
The most obvious example is Pastor Maldonado, who qualified a brilliant 7th at Silvestone and then lost three places off the startline. This is a strong trend this year for the Venezuelan, who has lost 19 places in 9 starts this season.
Webber also has a poor start record – he’s lost 12 places in 9 starts – and he lost the lead at the start to Vettel at Silverstone.
Re-printed from James Allen on F1 - The official website
