Alonso had fastest pit stop in Canada

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Fernando Alonso enjoyed the fastest pit stop of the Canadian Grand Prix – which helped him jump ahead of Lewis Hamilton early in the race.

No other team managed a pit stop within a quarter of a second as fast as Ferrari’s lightning-quick effort. Felipe Massa’s best stop was over three seconds slower than Alonso’s.

Hamilton had a slow first pit stop and lost a position, as he did in Istanbul. But his second visit to the pits was among the quickest of the race.

Mercedes showed their form in the pit lane with three of the seven quickest stops of the day. Here are the pit stop times in full.

DriverTeamPit stop timeOn lap
1Fernando AlonsoFerrari7.1777
2Michael SchumacherMercedes7.45233
3Fernando AlonsoFerrari7.46328
4Michael SchumacherMercedes7.47912
5Jaime AlguersuariToro Rosso7.56725
6Vitantonio LiuzziForce India7.64524
7Nico RosbergMercedes7.70627
8Lewis HamiltonMcLaren7.73126
9Nico HulkenbergWilliams7.79924
10Jenson ButtonMcLaren7.827
11Robert KubicaRenault7.8369
12Mark WebberRed Bull7.88813
13Adrian SutilForce India7.8926
14Nico RosbergMercedes8.0345
15Robert KubicaRenault8.07459
16Sebastian VettelRed Bull8.0814
17Sebastian VettelRed Bull8.16327
18Mark WebberRed Bull8.20950
19Jaime AlguersuariToro Rosso8.2337
20Nico HulkenbergWilliams8.25658
21Sebastien BuemiToro Rosso8.31535
22Sebastien BuemiToro Rosso8.43215
23Timo GlockVirgin8.45748
24Vitaly PetrovRenault8.46456
25Jenson ButtonMcLaren8.4686
26Robert KubicaRenault8.64226
27Michael SchumacherMercedes8.64614
28Lewis HamiltonMcLaren8.697
29Timo GlockVirgin8.69632
30Rubens BarrichelloWilliams8.8617
31Timo GlockVirgin8.89824
32Jaime AlguersuariToro Rosso9.12642
33Felipe MassaFerrari9.27141
34Lucas di GrassiVirgin9.33828
35Heikki KovalainenLotus9.38651
36Jarno TrulliLotus9.42430
37Rubens BarrichelloWilliams9.44130
38Lucas di GrassiVirgin9.58540
39Pedro de la RosaSauber9.59618
40Timo GlockVirgin9.98215
41Heikki KovalainenLotus10.0616
42Lucas di GrassiVirgin10.09114
43Felipe MassaFerrari10.20823
44Sebastien BuemiToro Rosso10.38850
45Karun ChandhokHRT10.41919
46Heikki KovalainenLotus10.82432
47Jarno TrulliLotus11.4085
48Adrian SutilForce India11.45327
49Karun ChandhokHRT11.78845
50Felipe MassaFerrari12.55763
51Nico HulkenbergWilliams13.3876
52Pedro de la RosaSauber13.6971
53Vitantonio LiuzziForce India14.991
54Rubens BarrichelloWilliams16.10911
55Vitaly PetrovRenault16.44618
56Jarno TrulliLotus21.6840
57Felipe MassaFerrari22.021
58Jarno TrulliLotus33.58141

As the FIA does not issue a list of stationary times for every pit stop the data above is based on their total pit stop times with the typical pit lane time loss (14.1s seconds according to Williams) subtracted and pit lane visits for drive-through penalties discarded.

These times therefore reflect not only how quickly the team performed the tyre change (typically around three seconds), but also how well the driver stopped on his mark and accelerated away again.

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    Keith Collantine
    Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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    24 comments on “Alonso had fastest pit stop in Canada”

    1. Pretty quick! I think Red Bull recorded the quickest actual stop, just tyres in Canada, around three seconds, or just under. Very impressive.

      1. Your right Ryan, Webber’s last stop was a 3.0 second stop, the fastest this year according Brundle

    2. It would be interesting to know what the actual stopped time was. Vettel’s was 3.3 according to the onscreen info during the race. Wonder if Alonso’s was mainly faster due to better braking/accelerating, or if the actual stop was quicker as well…

      1. I think i remember, that Alonso had a 3.2 stop there, but it also shows the experience of the drivers.

        Schumi shows he is good at it, being respectably quicker than Rosberg. Still Mercedes seem to be at the top of quick stops. They did some in earlier races as well.

        1. It’s one thing Merc seems to have got really right, I can’t remember Bahrain, But from Aus, they have been the quickest, or close to, barring issues.

    3. I didn’t catch Red Bull’s pitstop times, if they were under 3 seconds, is that the first one this year? I saw Nico Rosberg had a 3.3 sec one, pretty quick!

    4. I think Webber’s second stop showed up as 3.0s on the world feed.

      1. Yeh, I think it was Webber’s, remember Leggard saying it was the quickest so far.

        1. I remember Legard spouting a lot of nonsense most weekends. He’s hardly a good source of info over the weekend

          1. Yeah, you’re not wrong there, however I’m just using him as a memorable reference. I remember him saying it, which jogged my memory of seeing the time.

            1. Pretty sure it was Brundle who said it, so it has some credibility!!

      2. Yeah thats what I saw.

    5. As these times are inferred and based on a typical pit lane time loss of 14.1 seconds (accurate, I assume, to one decimal place), quoting them to thousandths of a second seems to be overdoing it a bit.

      Surely allowing for margin of error we’d have to say Nico Hülkenberg’s 7.799 is the same as Jenson Button’s 7.8s.

      Also, is the 14.1s loss the extra time spent driving through the pits? To calculate the actual pit stop time from the total time in the pit lane, don’t we need also to deduct the time the car would have spent on the track between the pit lane entrance and exit if it hadn’t stopped?

      1. As mentioned in the article, Keith had the total pit times (from entry point to exit) from the FIA – those are the first times shown on TV, before showing the time spent standing still – and these times are with an accuracy of 0.001, so the times are accurate.

      2. I don’t think the 14.1 matters if you’re talking about decimal accuracy – add it back on to all the times and you still get the same 0.001s different between Button and Hülkenberg.

        I don’t know what you mean by ‘actual’ pit stop time in your second question. If you’re talking about stationary time then the only way to get that is to time the pit stops, because of the variation between how quickly a car brakes to and accelerates away from their pit box.

        1. Well really, this 0.001 s sensitivity can be right only if it is triggered from a point at the entrance of the pitlane and stopped at another point at the end of the pit lane. As it is then machine triggered. And to this extent, the “driver reaction time” factor will be overwelmingly important over the speed of actual pit stop.

          Any timing of actual pit stop per say has to be taken back to 0.1 s or even to the second as it is human deicision that triggers and stops the timing (even accounting the time it takes to lift the car and let it back down).

          So 0,001 timings are only accurate as far as time spent in the pitlane goes. Any timing of actual pit stop will certainly be flawed (or at least not refined).

          Sensitivity of measure is always important. Per example, giving a temperature with 0,01 degrees definition (as some home thermometres do) is senseless : it is impossible to have such measurement (and it will be very variable).

        2. Total pitstop time is a lot more important to stationary time since it shows the slow down, hitting marks and getting out of the box again. A lot of people complained about ‘total time’ when it was introduced, but it is far more accurate in showing how much time was lost than what stationary time is. Stationary time is only good to measure the performance of pit crews, rather than the driver.

    6. i think mercedes are the fastest in general. looks like lotus are pretty slow.

    7. That was amazing watching them come out of the pit lane side by side… I almost dropped my beer!!… I was in Grandstand 11 so I had a great view of the pass… :) It was a thrilling moment of an amazing race… too bad the traffic cost Fernando the win… :)

    8. Interesting, Virgin seems to have got their pit stops covered pretty well. Both drivers are quite a lot in front of both Lotus and HRT.
      Experience also seems to show, with Glock having more experience (in total and in the race, with 5 stops).

    9. Is there any reason why the FIA does not release the stationary time of the cars at the pit stop, such as they do not always have that information for every stop so they don’t want to release an incomplete list?

      1. I don’t know, but I guess the only way they could do it would be to have a group of people timing every pit stop. There would need to be at least 12 people (one at each team) which is quite a lot of manpower, which is expensive.

        1. I don’t know if I am getting confused with the system used to determine if someone jumped the start, but years ago, possibly in the 1990s, I remember a commentator saying that they actually put sensors in the ground which could measure when a car was stationary through a sensor in the car.

          The only race at the time where this didn’t happen was at Monaco as they weren’t allowed to drill holes in the ground to place the sensors.

    10. This was the first time Ferrari had been quickest at pit stops this year. I’ll have data up for all the teams in all the races later today.

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