Why the Two-Stop Strategy? | 2024 Dutch GP F1 Akkodis Race Debrief

It was really just telling us  the car was too much on the nose,   too much on a knife-edge, too hard to handle… Hi, I'm Miles and I'm here with James to answer  your questions about the Dutch Grand Prix.  James, first race back after the  shutdown. How's your time off?  Well, it feels like a million years ago now, but  it was heavenly. I think all of us look forward   to the shutdown. We're tired beforehand. And also  the nature of the shutdown rules means that it is   a very blissful pair of weeks because they  are guilt-free holiday. You know that the   inbox isn't filling. You know the jobs  aren't sort of building up for when you   get back. It's just a brilliant two weeks. We  can spend it with family, do jobs you weren't   otherwise going to do, just have fun and  not feel bad about it. So it was great. Let's get stuck in. From FP1 to the race itself,  the weather in Zandvoort seemed tricky. How much   impact did the wind have on the car and indeed  the job of setting up the car during the weekend?  When you're setting a car up, you arrive with  something that's not a million miles off normally   and you're trying to find small steps, subtle  changes to just make it a little bit happier on   the track. And the nirvana would be completely  consistent conditions. So you're seeing the   effect of what you're doing. When the wind is  howling a gale and the rain's coming down and   the track is dry sometimes and wet others, it's  hellishly hard to actually figure out what you're   doing and what the outside world is doing to you.  So yeah, it really does complicate things a lot. Now before the summer shutdown, we could say  we really started to find the true pace of   the W15. Our fans on YouTube want to know,  where do you think the pace of the past few   races has gone? Or is it just the case  that it wasn't a good track for our car?  It won't be as simple as, oh, the track doesn't  suit the car. Whether or not you have a good   weekend is dependent on a huge number of things.  And all of them have to be pretty much near dead   on right to get what you call the true pace of  the car out. And in the run up to the shutdown,   we managed to hit our stride pretty much at every  track. We sort of went a little bit off the rails   in Spa, but managed to pull it back just in time.  This weekend in Zandvoort, with the weather the   way it was on the Friday and the decisions we  took overnight, we just didn't manage to get   the groove that we needed to, to get the best  from the car. And small mistakes, small errors   in setup will turn you from being really quite  competitive into quite mediocre. It's tight at   the top. And we didn't get it right this weekend  and had a mediocre result as a consequence. Obviously, as you know, there's been a lot  of discussion about the new floor. How do   we feel it performed during this weekend? Simple answer is, we don't fully know. You   can take some straightforward measurements  and say that the downforce it was supposed   to deliver looked like it was there. So at one  level, you could take comfort that it worked as   expected. But a lot of the pace of the cars  in this year, particularly, is down to how   well they handle. So it's not just a question of  ‘does your aero package deliver you downforce’,   but is it delivering you the balanced car that  you need through the corners? Is it delivering   you the balanced car you need from high speed to  low speed? And we definitely know that we didn't   have a well-balanced car this weekend. That's  where most of our pace went. Whether that was the   new floor, the new aero package or not, we need  to keep an open mind and something we will need to   revisit in future races. So right now, we know it  measured the downforce, but we're not certain that   it delivered good balance. Something we need  to investigate as we go on through the year. A question from LinkedIn. What happened with  Lewis in quali? It seemed like in the race he   had a real chance of fighting for a podium. Yeah, and look at him in Q1. Glorious lap in   Q1 and then knocked out in Q2. A surprise to him,  a surprise to all of us. But I think what you're   seeing there is that thing I was talking about  with the car's balance. We, for whatever reason,   managed to produce a car this weekend that was  too on a knife edge. It was too ready to snap   at the rear, for the rear to lose grip and  contact with the road when the drivers are   trying to hustle it. And qualifying is when  they need to lean on the car and we could get   a really good lap if they just managed to keep  this very pointy car sort of on rails. But just   the tiniest slip of the rear caused by a gust,  caused by whatever, and then the rear tyres will   light up. The temperature of the surface of the  rubber goes up dramatically just with one tiny   little slip. As soon as that surface temperature  is up, it doesn't recover for several corners. The   corners come at you thick and fast in Zandvoort  and there's not really any long straights for   them to cool down on. And so one snap, that's  your lap gone. And that's what happened with   Lewis. That's what happened to George in Q1 when  Lewis was the fastest car. George then did an OK   lap in Q2 and Lewis got knocked out. It was really  just telling us the car was too much on the nose,   too much on a knife edge, too hard to  handle. And that was something we paid   a price for in quali and we paid a price for  later on in the weekend in the race as well. In terms of tyre choice, our fans from Weibo want  to know if the Soft/Medium/Soft would have been a   better choice for Lewis than the Soft/Hard/Soft? Possibly, although the Hard looked like an OK   tyre, probably the best tyre that race. And the  real question is, would a one-stop have been   better than a two-stop? And if you're going to  do a one-stop, then starting where Lewis started,   Soft was an OK choice for the first stint because  we managed to make a few places there. And then   it's Hard to the finish. That was the strategic  choice. And Hard was definitely the right tyre   to pick to go from there to the end of the race.  However, we had to abandon that strategy to go   to Soft/Hard/Soft because Lewis had a lock-up  which then damaged the tyre, which then took   away the pace of the car. And then we're on a  recovery strategy at that point, having to make   it into a two-stop. And Soft was our best option  for completing the race. But Soft/Hard/Soft,   Soft/Medium/Soft, neither is competitive compared  with Soft/Hard, which was our intended strategy.   And the second stop was only really a function of  trying to recover from that lock-up, because the   pace he had on the Hard tyre prior to the lock-up  was very competitive. Once he got himself free of   all those back markers, the car was running  quite well and he would have been doing good. Lap 54, we put George on a set of used  Softs. Our fans from Instagram want to know,   what was the thinking behind George's second  stop? And could he have secured P6 without it?  With the benefit of hindsight, yes. He could have  come home ahead of Perez if we had not made that   second stop. At the time we took that decision,  Perez was still going reasonably strong. Sainz,   who I think was in front of him, more strongly  still. And we were reasonably convinced   both those cars were going to drive past us on  the road. They would have had the sort of delta   in performance sufficient to overtake us on the  track. At the time we made that decision as well,   our prediction of how long our tyres were  going to last was telling us they were going   to run out of beans around about lap 65, 66.  And therefore, the car was just going to be   really crawling around at the end. And we had the  opportunity to pre-emptively stop, put him on the   Soft. And if the car ran strongly on that Soft,  then we had a hypothetical chance of then climbing   back up, attacking Perez with the pace of newer  tyres, and maybe even having a go at Sainz. So   instead of surrendering the two places we thought  were certainly lost, maybe a chance to get them   back. In the end, that was overly optimistic. We  didn't have the pace to come back and get those   two places we voluntarily surrendered. And in  retrospect, we wish we had just stayed out on   the track and taken our chances. Almost certainly  would have lost to Sainz, but we probably would   have held our own against Perez, who had his  own tyre issues, we learned a few laps later. This year, Monza is undergoing a few changes,  including a complete resurfacing of the track.   What are our expectations for Monza? Well, hopefully a resumption of the   sort of pace we had running up to the summer break  rather than the rather disappointing Zandvoort we   just experienced. It's going to be an interesting  weekend though. Monza has just been resurfaced, so   new tarmac throughout and with Pirelli electing to  bring the softest of the rubber to that track. New   tarmac is very grippy, but it also brings with it  the risk of graining. That's when the tyre sticks   to the road and tears, physically tears itself  to bits if it turns out that the stress is too   high in the tyre. So that'll be a thing to look  out for. I think that we ought to be able to get   the car dialled in alright on the setup. We'll go  and figure out for sure whether that aero upgrade   that we bought to Zandvoort was hampering us or  helping us. And with a bit of luck, just a smooth   weekend competing, I hope, for a podium or better.  But we'll see what happens when we get there.