F1 Fanatic

When the safety car is deployed, everyone is expected to slow down and drive at a safe pace until they catch the safety car. When the safety car was deployed, Hamilton had already passed the pit entry, so he had to do most of a lap at a lower speed. Vettel was much closer to the pit entry, so he could get in and out of the pits before Hamilton came back around.

Here’s the lowdown. The McLarens pit. Vettel stays out. He’s obviously flat out. As Vettel reaches Turn 11 the safety car comes out. So Vettel’s inlap was only affected in sector three. Meanwhile Lewis comes out and has to go through a whole lap of safety car limit – vs the lap Vettel did which was only safety limited in sector 3. It was the luck of the draw.

Yeah, would have been nice to see the driver tracker when this happened so you could have seen where they were and how the safety car affected them.

It seems the general consensus is that the safety car gifted Vettel the second place, and that he would have only gotten third if not for the ‘gifted’ pit stop. It’s a shame that this idea clouds what actually went on and just leaves some with a sour aftertaste.

Vettel on his option tires was much faster than Hamilton when he closed up to him, but with a +10kph speed difference, making an overtaking move on Hamilton would have killed his tires. The moment Hamilton got the call he needed a few more laps before his pit stop, Vettel closed on him with tenths-of-a-second laps and he was less than a second behind when Hamilton pitted.

Vettel was biding his time, saving his tires so that he could get the undercut on Hamilton. The shame is that with the safety car, we didn’t actually get to see how things would have panned out. If Vettel was able to make up the time and make the undercut. But simply putting it away as “Vettel was lucky” takes away from a brilliant piece of strategy we saw today.

Sorry, mix up of terms.
Leap frog.

I haven’t heard of the delta time before, but it seems kind of odd. While some (notably Vettel and Schumacher) are very good at putting in exact lap times on command, none of the drivers have any concept on how much slower 10 seconds is. Doesn’t seem like a very realistic target. The way I understand it, they just have to treat it like a double yellow flag: clearly slow down so that you can anticipate any surprises.