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UBS Race Strategy Briefing

The UBS Race Strategy Briefing before each Grand Prix gives you the lowdown on all the vital considerations the F1 teams will take on board when deciding what Race Strategy to use in the forthcoming Grand Prix. A bad decision can cost a race victory, whereas a bold gamble can sometimes steal one from the jaws of defeat. So put yourself in the know and get the inside line on how the race will be won.

UBS Race Strategy Report

The UBS Race Strategy Report is a unique analysis of the key decisions on the pit wall and in the cockpit that decided the outcome of the latest Grand Prix. It's the indispensable guide to the who, the why and the how behind every Grand Prix result.

Year	Driver	Constructor
2011	Sebastian Vettel	Red Bull-Renault
2010	Fernando Alonso	Ferrari
2009	Rubens Barrichello	Brawn-Mercedes
2008	Sebastian Vettel	Toro Rosso-Ferrari
2007	Fernando Alonso	McLaren-Mercedes
2006	Michael Schumacher	Ferrari
2005	Juan Pablo Montoya	McLaren-Mercedes
2004	Rubens Barrichello	Ferrari
2003	Michael Schumacher	Ferrari
2002	Rubens Barrichello	Ferrari

Track characteristics

Monza – 5.793 kilometres. Race distance - 53 laps = 306.72 kilometres. 11 corners in total. Average speed 247km/h. Historic race track in a Royal Park.

Aerodynamic setup – Low down force. Top speed 340km/h (with Drag Reduction System active on rear wing) - 334km/h without.

Full throttle – 75% of the lap (high). Total fuel needed for race distance – 135 kilos (average). Fuel consumption – 2.5kg per lap (average)

Time spent braking: 11% of lap. Number of brake zones – 6. Brake wear- High.

Loss time for a pit stop = 18 seconds (average/high)

Total time needed for pit stop: 22 seconds (average/high)

Fuel effect (cost in lap time per 10kg of fuel carried): 0.35 seconds (average/high)

With an average lap speed of over 250km/h, Monza is the fastest circuit in Formula 1. Monza is one of the great, classic venues on the F1 calendar. It has hosted a Grand Prix since the very first season of F1 in 1950 and provides variety to the calendar with its high speed character. The cars run in low down force mode here with thinner wings than usual. The aerodynamic package for this event is unique in the season.

From a strategy point of view, Monza is quite straightforward. It’s not particularly hard on the tyres as there are few fast corners, which put energy into them. The track is basically a series of long straights, punctuated with chicanes. There are only three corners in a traditional sense; the two Lesmo bends and the Parabolica.

However the wheel rotation speeds are very high so overheating can be an issue and if the track temperature is high, this can create problems. Pirelli counter this heat build up by using a thinner gauge on the treadblock. This year they are bringing medium and hard compounds, last year it was soft and medium.

Because the track is fast and the pit lane is long at over 22 seconds, the teams aim to make as few pit stops if possible, ideally trying to do the race in one stop.

Last year the FIA decided that there should be two DRS zones in the race, so the pursuing car could open his rear wing to shed drag and attempt an overtake. One was on the main straight, the other between the Lesmo bends and Ascari corner. One of the key decisions was how to balance the use of the DRS wing (giving a 6-8km/h speed boost) while not hitting the rev limiter which is set at 18,000 rpm.

Falling behind a car which has good top speed, but is slow on lap time is very damaging for the strategy as we saw last year with Hamilton stuck behind Schumacher, so qualifying and starting well are vitally important.

There is a lot of hard braking at Monza. Although stability under braking is critical, brake wear is not the problem it used to be because of improvements in cooling systems. The long straights give the brakes a chance to recover.

Form Guide

The FORMULA 1 GRAN PREMIO SANTANDER D'ITALIA 2012 is the thirteenth round of the 2012 FIA F1 World Championship.

After an early season where the wins were spread around, recently things have consolidated with McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari taking the spoils, with Lotus challenging too. Red Bull has never had the best straight line speeds, but managed to win the race last year due to clever gearing which kept Vettel ahead on acceleration out of the chicanes.

From a driver perspective, Fernando Alonso won the Italian Grand Prix on his debut season with Ferrari in 2010, his second Monza win.

Michael Schumacher won the race five times for Ferrari, Sebastian Vettel won in a Toro Rosso in 2008 and again last year in a Red Bull.

Weather Forecast

The long term weather forecast predicts a warm and sunny weekend with temperatures of 29 degrees.

Likely tire performance and other considerations

Pirelli tyre choice for Monza: medium (white markings) and hard (silver markings). This combination was seen in Malaysia and Belgium.

Monza is not a track that causes high wear rates on the tyres. What the teams have to watch out for is thermal degradation caused by very high wheel rotation speeds. When the car is travelling at in excess of 330km/kh, it’s easy to overheat the inside shoulder of the tyres, causing blisters. The stress from this in Monza will be 30% higher than Spa.

Track temperatures tend to fluctuate a lot at Monza, as it is the early Autumn so with cloud cover the temperature drops, while it quickly heats up in direct sun. With this year’s temperature-sensitive Pirelli tyres, this could cause some problems for some teams.

The medium tyre is expected to be around 0.2 seconds per lap faster than the hard tyre in race conditions.

Number and likely timing of pit stops

Monza was always an one stop race in the past when refueling was allowed in F1 and the signs are with this year’s more durable Pirelli tyres that the target will be to one stop again.

The main reason is that the time needed for a pit stop at Monza is on the high side at over 22 seconds. It’s a long pit lane and the cars on track exit the final corner at over 200km/h and go down the pit straight at over 300km/h.

With tyre wear not expected to be a major problem, the likelihood is that teams will start on the medium, stop once around 20-23 laps moving onto the hard compound for a stint of around 30 laps.

Drivers who qualify out of the top ten positions and have new tyres at their disposal will have a small advantage in the opening stint, being able to run a little longer. This could help a team like Sauber which has good race pace and good tyre life.

Chances of a safety car

The chance of a safety car at Monza is statistically very low at 43% and 0.4 Safety Cars per race. There was however a Safety car three years in a row recently from 2007 - 2009.

Recent start performance

Starts are a critical part of the race and strategy can be badly compromised by a poor start, while good starts can make strategists change their plans in the hope of a good result. Much can change. In Hungary, for example, only three drivers completed lap 1 in the same position as their grid slot.

As far as 2011 start performance is concerned drivers have gained (+) or lost (-) places off the start line this season on aggregate as follows:

Gained:

+25 Massa

+23 Glock

+19 Perez

+18 Alonso, Kovalainen

+15 Senna

+14 Vergne

+13 Pic

+11 Raikkonen

+10 Karthikeyan

+7 Kobayashi

+5 Schumacher

+4 Hamilton, Maldonado

+3 Di Resta, De la Rosa, Petrov

+2 Button

2 Button

Held position: Vettel, Webber

Lost:

-1 Hulkenberg Rosberg

-3 Grosjean

-15 Ricciardo

Pit Stop League Table

Of course good strategy planning also requires good pit stop execution by the mechanics and we have seen tyre stops carried out in less than two and a half seconds by F1 teams. The record is a 2.31s stop in the FORMULA 1 GROSSER PREIS SANTANDER VON DEUTSCHLAND 2012 by McLaren.

It is clear that the field has significantly closed up in pit stops.

The league table below shows the order of the pit crews based on their fastest pit stop in the 2012 FORMULA 1 SHELL BELGIAN GRAND PRIX. The league positions from the previous race are in brackets.

Rank	Team	Pit stop time
1	Red Bull	3.21s
2	McLaren	2.50s
3	Ferrari	3.13s
4	Toro Rosso	3.10s
5	Williams	4.52s
6	Lotus	3.12s
7	Sauber	4.50s
8	Mercedes	3.36s
9	Force India	3.52s
10	Marrusia	3.48s
11	Caterham	4.01s
12	HRT	4.90s

Monza, September 2 2012

The FORMULA 1 GRAN PREMIO SANTANDER D'ITALIA was one of the most exciting races of the 2012 season so far, which is unusual for Monza. The track has a high-speed character and opportunities for overtaking, but doesn’t always provide excitement.

However this year’s race was brought alive by the strategy decisions made by some of the teams and the bold gamble taken by many of them to try to do the race with only one pit stop. It was marginal in terms of tyre life. Some of the tyres that came off the cars at the end had no more than a lap of life left in them.

Meanwhile Sauber, which has a far smaller strategy department than the F1 front runners with far less sophisticated tools, managed to play a blinder and sent its driver from 12^th on the grid to 2^nd at the flag thanks to a brilliantly planned and executed strategy and to an outstanding performance by the driver, Sergio Perez.

Pre-race expectations

Unlike recent Grands Prix, the teams were able to do extensive mileage on Friday in practice and learned a lot about the tyres. Before the race the simulations showed one stop to be faster than two by 10 seconds. However one notable limiting factor was the wear on the inside shoulder of the right front tyre. This was showing signs on some cars of wearing down to the nylon, so managing that was crucial.

Nevertheless most teams set out with the intention of stopping only once. The choice of medium and hard tyres by Pirelli was pretty conservative, by recent standards, something of a shift in approach. This may have been influenced by some lobbying earlier in the season by teams who were struggling to get the tyres to last and by some problems encountered last season at Spa and Monza, which Pirelli did not want to repeat.

The two cars with the best tyre wear this season are the Lotus and the Sauber. Here they had another chance to use this to their advantage as the others would be very marginal on tyre wear at the end of the first stint and in the last laps of the race. Lotus did not have the pace to exploit this in Monza, but Sauber did.

Perez turns the tables

Sauber did a similar strategy in Monza to the one which had brought Perez a podium in Montreal from outside the top ten on the grid; they took a new set of the harder tyres at the start, ran a long first stint and then stopped once.

Starting in Monza with Perez in 12^th place on the grid, Sauber knew that many cars aiming to do one stop would be struggling to get to a stage in the race for the first stop, which would leave them a manageable number of laps to do on the hard tyre at the end. So at the end of the first stint and in the final laps of the race they would be vulnerable. Perez used the hard tyre at the start and had very good pace on it. He also helped his cause by passing Senna and Rosberg in the opening laps. He picked off di Resta on lap six, Kobayashi a lap later and then waited in 8^th place behind Raikkonen.

Once the cars in front, who were pushing to make it beyond lap 20 for a stop, started to struggle, he was able to capitalise and pick up places. Raikkonen had to stop on lap 17, as the tyres were going off, but Lotus knew that they could get to the finish without problems on the hard tyre.

Massa stopped, then Vettel and Alonso together, then Button and finally Hamilton. Perez was now leading on lap 24. He was aiming for lap 28 to make his stop, but was told that the wear was good so the new stop time was “Target plus 4” which would be lap 32. Sauber changed that, however, as it became clear that the tyres had gone, so he pitted on lap 30 for a new set of medium tyres, rejoining behind Raikkonen, who was 13 laps into a 36 lap stint.

Perez’ pace on the mediums was astonishing, once past Raikkonen; he was able to run a second per lap faster than the leader Hamilton. This continued into the phase Sauber had anticipated, where 10 laps from the end the Ferraris, which had stopped on laps 19 and 20, were two seconds slower than Perez. He passed them easily to take second place.

He was not able to catch Hamilton however. The McLaren driver had been taking it fairly easy in the second half of the race, as illustrated by the fact that from lap 39 onwards he was running on the same pace as Raikkonen, whose Lotus on worn tyres didn’t have much pace. Raikkonen, incidentally, did a very good job to manage the car with its ultra-low downforce set up for a fifth place finish.

Why Mercedes stopped twice

It was clear before the race started that one front running team was planning to do two stops. The Mercedes drivers had both saved a set of new medium tyres from qualifying, which would only be worth doing if you planned to stop twice, as the rules state that you must use one set of each compound and they were starting on the medium tyres from qualifying.

Sometimes the call between one stop and two is marginal, but here with one stop being 10 seconds faster than two stops, that was quite a lot to give up unless you had to. Once again Mercedes were concerned with tyre wear.

Also they had a painful experience in Spa, which they did not want to repeat, whereby they attempted to one-stop but found that they couldn’t and lost track positions after the forced second stop. To do that at Monza would mean losing any chance of points, so they had to do two stops. The Mercedes was fairly competitive in Monza, certainly with Schumacher, and he was in the hunt for fourth place, but had to settle for sixth with the track positions he lost by stopping twice. That said he was catching Massa and Raikkonen at the end and another lap or two he would have passed them both for fourth place, perhaps he might have achieved that had he made his second stop a lap earlier..

The UBS Race Strategy Report is written by James Allen with input and data from team strategists and from Pirelli.

RACE HISTORY (courtesy of Williams F1)

Perhaps the most revealing one yet: look at Perez pace on the medium tyre in the second stint. Look also at how he had to stop on lap 30 as his tyre performance had suddenly fallen off a cliff. Also see how close Schumacher came to catching Massa and Raikkonen at the end. See the difference in pace between Alonso and Massa once Alonso passed his team mate.