Basics of F1 Race Strategy

hello everyone there's some of a quick look at something that we've taken for granted for way too long let's look at race strategy during an f1 weekend you'll hear things like we're expecting one-stop strategies of this check or to stop - is the norm but some teams might try and go for the one-stop what factors determine what make the best strategy at a given track and how the teams go about calculating this in this video I'm going to go over the basic variables that build towards an effective race strategy let's simplify this right down to make it easy to see how everything works let's start by imagining a 10-lap race I'm gonna draw a bar chart with the length of each bar representing a lap time let's start by looking at different pit strategies with different compound tires let's say at a certain race you've got the soft tire that lasts for five to six laps and will give you lap times of 80 seconds and the super soft tire which will last for about three or four laps and give you lap times of 75 seconds so five seconds quicker a pit stop will cost you 25 seconds no matter what ties you've got on for the moment we're going to ignore all other variables and rules which is keeping it simple to start okay so once - she could be running the soft tie for five laps pitting and then running the soft tire for another five laps another strategy could be running the super stops for four laps pitting running them for another three laps pitting again and then running a third set of supersoft until the end which is the better strategy well we can work this out by adding up all the lap times two plus the pit stops and this is the only math I'm gonna do in this whole video so don't worry the one-stop soft tire strategy is 80 seconds a lap times ten laps plus the 25 seconds with a pit stop that comes to eight hundred and twenty five seconds for the whole race the two stop supersoft strategy is 75 seconds times the 10 laps plus two times twenty five second pit stops that all adds up to eight hundred seconds so in this very simplified model the - stop - is fastest by 25 seconds now we build on this one thing we need to add into our model is the tire wear profile so this describes how the grip level of the tire drops off with every lap I'll go into more detail on how and why type performance degrades in another video but in basic terms we're going to assume the tire bit it's fastest when fresh and get slower and slower with every lap the way in which the tire wears will depend on certain things like the type of compound is made of the track surface the temperature and how many fast corners there are etc but we can essentially draw a curve like this to describe how the tire wear will affect the lap times over the course of the race fast the lap times upfront lengthening over time we can see here what's referred to as the cliff this is when the lap times start to plummet rapidly due to excessive degradation of the tire rubber drive also want to pit before it hits this level here's how the one stop strategy changes if we factor in the tire wear profile and now we see the curve replicated in the bars it's easy to see how much time can be lost due to tire wear over the course of race and dealing with this through strategy is vitally important now this model stress you've been looking at is naturally allowed in the real f1 as we know each driver has to use two different compounds of tire out of a choice of three during the course of a race how you use the available compounds by assembling a race out of a number of stints can make all the difference to your result so let's extend the model a little bit and let's give them 20 laps now and this will make stints easier to see now an example of a conservative strategy might be start on the supersoft tire it's almost always best to use the grippy estai for the start to get off the line well get in the fight for the early positions let's say the super soft tire has six good laps in it after six laps you might take a pit stop and run the medium tires all the way to the end of the race now the mediums aren't amazingly fast but they are consistent and they will take you to the end meaning you don't have to take a second pit stop alternatively you might take a more aggressive strategy you start with a super soft a six lap again but then you switch to the soft tire the soft is faster than the mediums but won't make it to the end of the race so you plan on taking a second pitstop and switching back to the super staffs for a faster sprint to the finish in this chasity you'll be on a faster compound a tire than the conservative strategy for 14 laps and that's 70% of the race but you do have to take an extra 25 second hitter for that second pit stop so you might find that the aggressive strategy is actually slower than the conservative strategy but you might still use it if a you think your driver and car are much better at managing the tires than the competition or be you expect some disruption to the race like a safety car and we'll get onto this a bit more in a bit now we've added the simple model for tire wear let's consider fuel so there's no refueling the cars are filled up at the start and over the race the fuel drops which makes the car get lighter over the course the race which improves overall lap time as the car has to expend less energy pulling its own weight around and it makes the cars easier on tire wear for simplicity's sake in our model let's just say the car gets faster as it uses that fuel in a fairly predictable way and again like with the tire where we can draw a curve to express how this affects the lap times now the cars allowed to be filled up with a hundred and five kilograms of fuel but running a maximum performance for the whole race may require closer to 200 kilograms not only that but the fuel weight is so detrimental to racing speed that strategies might not even want to fill the car to the brim this means that some fuel management is needed throughout the race race strategists will arrive at the circuit with certain expectations the start of the race and the laps around the pit stop phases will be the prime time to go maximum on the engine to get fast lap times and beat the competition and you can see more about how this can be used to your advantage by watching the undercut video and then there might be a safety car or two safety car and virtual safety cards are run slow not only slow but everybody has to keep the same pace the engine we use much less fuel and the tires will take much less wear and tear as you're actually not demanding very much of the car at all this means that the more laps they run behind the safety car the harder the cars can run in the remaining laps of the race they can take the softer tires longer they can run in higher engine modes for longer if the safety car period occurs here this neutralizes these laps which and bear in mind I am Homer simplifying this effectively chops these laps out of the race in the example here the safety car comes out on lap 12 for three laps at the time the teams are expecting eight more laps of racing but now they've only got five more laps of racing the car on the conservative strategy can now switch things up take a free pit stop and match the pace of the aggressive super swap strategy for the rest of the race now you can't predict a safety car or virtual safety car but you can make an educated guess some tracks like Monaco or Singapore have a high chance of a safety car occurring so you might come at the race with some strategies that allow you the flexibility to change things up or you might go aggressive with the fuel if you believe you'll be able to save some while under the safety car we've covered some of the basic variables to go into building some race gestures there are other factors that would need considering along the way which I'll just briefly run through quickly one the weather variations in temperature and the probability of rain might not think your compound choices if you expecting some rain to come in halfway through the race then you're not going to do the conservative strategy that we showed where you pick the medium tires to run to the end of the race because you're not expecting to run to the end of the race on those tires you're going to switch on to probably intermediates if the track is difficult to overtake on you might choose not to go aggressive as aggressive strategies normally require some overtaking if you take the extra pit stop which puts you behind other cars who you'll now need to overtake in order to exploit your lap time potential you may even get stuck behind unexpectedly slow cars through no fault of your own in cases where you expect to encounter some traffic you might switch up your strategies so that your pit stops are out of sync with the cars around you so you don't end up on the check in the same place as then and also a team may often concoct strategies that take into account both of their drivers to make sure they're both fairly treated to keep them out the way each other on the track or to allow the number two driver to assist the number one driver in their quest for title glory now this has just been a simple introduction to the way that strategies are put together and these are very basic models compared to what they're actually using at the track but at its very essence you're always modeling how lap times are expected to unfold adding those times together and trying to come up with a strategy that produces the smallest overall race time from all of those laps it's simple really right right if you enjoyed this video consider sponsoring me on patreon every little bit helps me keep videos coming out consistently

Channel: Chain Bear

Views: 1,587,038

Keywords: f1, formula 1, explained, how to, racing, how does, strategy, lap times, pit stops

Id: wqf-dJyU_WA

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I love this dude

[u/[deleted]]

All his videos are so good. Love the one about the current power units.