F1 strategy mistakes: 4 pit-wall calls that cost 3 wins and a title

Four pit-wall calls cost 3 Grand Prix wins and a world championship between them: Mercedes at Monaco in 2015, Ferrari at Silverstone in 2022, McLaren at Sochi in 2021 and Ferrari again at Abu Dhabi in 2010. Only one of them was a maths error.

In each case the team had the data and the driver had the feel of the car. The race was lost in the few seconds when neither of them was clearly in charge.

Monaco shows how little time there is. Mercedes made its final call 50 metres before the pit-lane entry, by Toto Wolff’s own account. “We had one second to react,” he said.

Here are the four, in order of what each one cost, from a win to a world title.

Monaco 2015: Mercedes pits Hamilton under the Safety Car

Lewis Hamilton was leading comfortably when Max Verstappen hit the back of Romain Grosjean’s Lotus at Sainte Devote on lap 64. Reports of the gap vary. RaceFans puts it at “more than 19 seconds” over Nico Rosberg by the time Hamilton came in.

2015 Monaco Grand Prix, top 3

Pos	Driver	Team	Gap
1	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	—
2	Sebastian Vettel	Ferrari	+4.486 s
3	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	+6.053 s

Source: Formula1.com — 2015 Monaco Grand Prix race result

The race ran under a Virtual Safety Car, the first ever used in F1, for about 30 seconds before a full Safety Car took over. Wolff said that switch is where the calculation broke: “In Monaco you have no GPS and this makes the whole exercise more difficult, so this is why we got it wrong when we switched from the virtual safety car to the safety car.”

Mercedes thought it had 3.5 seconds in hand on top of a normal stop. “And that disappeared,” Wolff said. “Somewhere the data got frozen.”

The idea of pitting started with Hamilton. On the radio he said: “These tyres have lost all their temperature. Everyone’s going to be on options now.” More than half the teams pitted a car under that Safety Car, so Mercedes was doing the normal thing, just with a broken number.

Hamilton’s in-lap took more than 2 minutes 11 seconds because he caught the Safety Car. Rosberg and Vettel hadn’t, and they gained the time Mercedes thought it had to spare.

He rejoined third, behind Rosberg and Vettel. “The simple answer is we got the maths wrong,” Wolff said that afternoon. In the same session he refused to pin it on anyone: “It was the team’s decision. We are all in this together, we make decisions together and it is not one person to blame.”

It cost Hamilton a win in a season he went on to win anyway, so it’s the cheapest of the four. It’s also the most famous, because it’s the one where the arithmetic really did fail, even though the call to pit started in the car.

Silverstone 2022: Ferrari pits Sainz, not Leclerc

Ferrari had both cars at the front when the Safety Car came out at Silverstone, and decided it could only pit one of them.

2022 British Grand Prix, top 4

Pos	Driver	Team	Gap
1	Carlos Sainz	Ferrari	—
2	Sergio Perez	Red Bull	+3.779 s
3	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	+6.225 s
4	Charles Leclerc	Ferrari	+8.546 s

Source: Formula1.com — 2022 British Grand Prix race result

Esteban Ocon’s Alpine slowed and stopped just before Copse after lap 38 of 52. Charles Leclerc was leading from Carlos Sainz. “Our two cars — in our view, certainly — were too close to stop both of them, so we had to take a decision,” Mattia Binotto said afterwards.

Sainz got fresh softs. Leclerc stayed out on used hards, and the usual retelling gets this bit backwards: Leclerc’s hards were the newer set. By Binotto’s account they had “six or seven laps less” on them than the ones Sainz had just taken off.

So Ferrari pitted the older tyres and left the fresher ones out front. The bet was that the soft would fall away after a few laps. It didn’t. “The softs didn’t degrade as we were hoping,” Binotto said.

The restart came on lap 43. Ferrari told Sainz to leave 10 car lengths to Leclerc, the maximum the rules allow, to give his team-mate room. Sainz refused, saying the cars behind would be aggressive and he needed to protect himself. He then used that proximity to pass Leclerc for the lead.

Binotto backed him: “Not only is it okay, I’m very happy with the way that Carlos behaved today.”

Sainz won his first Grand Prix at his 150th start. Leclerc was also passed by Sergio Perez and Hamilton and finished fourth, 13 points short of what the win would have paid. Ferrari had a plan for both cars and couldn’t get one of its own drivers to follow it.

Sochi 2021: Norris stays out on slicks

McLaren had the authority to bring Lando Norris in at Sochi and chose not to use it.

2021 Russian Grand Prix: where the three drivers finished

Pos	Driver	Team	Gap
1	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	—
4	Daniel Ricciardo	McLaren	+65.607 s
7	Lando Norris	McLaren	+87.224 s

Source: Formula1.com — 2021 Russian Grand Prix race result

Norris started from pole and led most of the Russian Grand Prix, with Hamilton chasing him for a 100th career win. Then the rain came.

On lap 47 his engineer, Will Joseph, told him: “Okay Lando this intensity will stay till the end of the race, we think.” Norris said afterwards that “they told me it was only going to be drizzling like it was for those first five laps, but it rained a lot more.”

The lap-49 exchange is usually told in the wrong order. Joseph spoke first: “Track very slippery from here to turn 10, lots of cars going off.” Norris replied: “Yeah, shut up!” Only then did Joseph ask: “Lando, what do you think about inter?” Norris: “No!”

Daniel Ricciardo, in the other McLaren, had already pitted for intermediates on lap 48. “I just told the team I need to come in for inters. I was very black and white with them,” he said. McLaren never told Norris that his team-mate had stopped.

Mercedes’ side of it gets told backwards too. Hamilton wasn’t forced in. He ignored the first “box” call and drove past the pit entry. “I ignored the first call, I was like, ‘no, he’s right there!’” he said. The strategists stayed “adamant”, and on lap 50 he pressed the pit-confirm button on his own steering wheel.

Norris slid off and spun on lap 51, pitted and finished seventh. Staying out on slicks cost him 68 seconds to Ricciardo, who finished fourth. Hamilton took his 100th win.

Andreas Seidl didn’t dodge it. “In hindsight, of course it was the wrong decision,” he said. “We always have the option to overrule the driver because we know he doesn’t have all the information.” He went further: “If we had told him ‘Come in’, he would have come in.”

McLaren asked once and accepted the answer. Mercedes asked, got a no and kept asking.

Abu Dhabi 2010: Ferrari pits Alonso into traffic

Ferrari lost the 2010 title by reacting to the wrong car, then leaving Fernando Alonso stuck behind a Renault for about 40 laps.

Final 2010 drivers’ championship, points

Vettel256 pts

Alonso252 pts

Webber242 pts

Hamilton240 pts

Source: Formula1.com — 2010 driver standings

Alonso arrived on 246 points, ahead of Mark Webber on 238, Sebastian Vettel on 231 and Hamilton on 222. It was the first finale at which four drivers could take the title. If Vettel won the race he would reach 256, so fourth place was enough for Alonso, at 258. Fifth would only have tied them. Four years later the same race paid double points, a rule that lasted one season.

A first-lap Safety Car, after Michael Schumacher spun and was collected by Vitantonio Liuzzi, let six drivers pit early and run to the flag. Nico Rosberg and Vitaly Petrov were among them.

Webber stopped on lap 11 because he had genuine tyre trouble, not as an undercut. On lap 12 Alonso was on the radio to his engineer, Andrea Stella: “If you see that Felipe can overtake him in a lap call him in.” Felipe Massa pitted on lap 14 and still came out behind Webber. Alonso was called in on lap 15 and rejoined behind Petrov’s Renault.

By lap 17 Stella knew what that meant: “We have to overtake the Renault in front, he won’t stop any more. After that it’s Rosberg.”

The Renault had better straight-line speed, and Alonso spent about 40 laps behind it. He finished seventh and lost the title to Vettel by 4 points, 256 to 252.

Stefano Domenicali listed the mistakes himself: “We marked a rival with two cars, we were unduly concerned about the wear rate of the soft tyres and we did not take into consideration the difficulty of getting past other cars on the track.”

Petrov, on the receiving end of Alonso’s raised fist, was drier. Alonso “should be angry with himself or with his team because they did maybe the wrong strategy,” he said.

Whose call it was

Put the four side by side and the same problem shows up each time.

At Monaco the tyre worry came from the driver, and the wall acted on it with a frozen number. At Silverstone the wall made a plan and a driver declined to follow it. At Sochi the wall could have overruled the driver and chose not to. At Abu Dhabi the driver was lobbying on the radio while the decision that lost him the championship was made around him.

The team had the data and the driver had the feel. In the seconds that mattered, nobody was clearly in charge.

Better software and forecasting cut down the guesswork. They don’t settle whose call it is, or who can overrule whom, and those were the questions Seidl faced in 2021 and Wolff in 2015.

Someone still has to commit to a call in about a second, knowing it might be wrong. In these four races, it wasn’t always clear who that someone was.