PAT SYMONDS PICTURES
MONTE CARLO OR BUST: TACTICS VS STRATEGY
For many the 1982 Austrian Grand Prix will be remembered for the incredibly close finish as Elio de Angelis’s Lotus claimed victory from the Williams of Keke Rosberg by just 0.05 seconds. For me, however, the outstanding memory was being in the pitlane as Nelson Piquet came in for what was the first planned pitstop for tyres and fuel of the modern era.
I was with Toleman at the time and although both our cars retired early, I’d stayed on the pitwall to watch the race unfold. In those days there was no pitlane speed limit and the velocity at which the car entered the pits was staggering. The stop itself took around 25 seconds, ten times today’s standard.
It was the start of a new way of thinking about how to execute a race and, although refuelling was banned for a while in 1984, the die was set and the understanding that a grand prix did not have to be non-stop was embedded.
In 1994, when refuelling was re-introduced, teams started to think about the subject in a more mathematical way and the concept generally known as race strategy was born. In those early days the software essentially worked on minimising race time, taking into account that the less fuel was in a car, the faster it would lap – while conversely the older the tyres were, the slower the lap would be.
These simulations were what are called deterministic. In other words, one set of conditions was imposed, and one outcome was determined. The conditions would be the effect of fuel load on lap time, the loss of lap time as the tyres degraded, and the actual stop laps and stop times.
This was helpful but, while minimising race time was an obvious objective, a less obvious one was that track position at critical times of the race was often more important. I always say that the objective is not to complete a race in the quickest possible time but to win it in the slowest possible time. This leads to the concept of the importance of track position and an understanding of when the driver needs to be driving at their maximum and when tyre and fuel conservation are more important. It also means that the probability of overtaking another car at any point in the race needs to be introduced.
