F1 Fanatic

Tyres? Fuel? that’s all the elements i can think of that impacts or determines strategies but it would be interesting to see if you Guys can think of several ways that strategies can be improved in this new era of Formula 1 where strategies have become so limited mostly due to the ban on Refuelling for 2010.Cheers!!!

I think regardless you’re going to wind up with teams coming to grips with the tires by the end of the year. That’s just the nature of the beast when you have some of the best and brightest engineers and strategists all clumped together working with some of the best technology. You can’t keep them guessing for long and eventually they’ll figure out how to configure the cars to suit the tires.

But I definitely support @magnificent-geoffrey ‘s idea of using any compound, but you’re limited on all of them. I think I’ve made a similar suggestion at some point. But it would allow for a variety of strategies and cars could then use the ones that suit their car best, yet still be forced to consider how best to use them. For example, you can’t go in to the race blind and hoping the super softs will be the optimal. You have to use at least one set in practice to find out, which will leave you 2 for the race. Okay, well then what do you do for qualifying? Save the two for Sunday and opt for the Softs on Saturday? Moreover, it forces the drivers to be kind to them. You screw up and flat spot one set and there goes a third of your supply.

Don’t allow pits stops (like in 2005). With Spain 2011-esque tyre degradation, let’s see who can make the Pirelli super-softs last an entire race. :P

I think we need to get our priorities right. What matters is the quality of the racing.

If I’ve just seen a close race where the winner was in doubt until the end, I’m not going to complain if all the drivers pitted twice, once or not at all. Strategy is incidental.

As interesting as strategies might be, I believe that nothing can top the drama of drivers in closely matched cars engaging in wheel to wheel combat on track. An overtake in the pits doesn’t have the high tension of on track battles.

Early in 2011 we saw late race battles for the lead as a result of tire strategy, about as dramatic as it gets. These varied strategies resulted produced cars close to each other on track with different levels of grip. However, as the season progressed, strategies among the front runners seemed to converge and gone were the dramatic late race charges and passes at the front. Even the midfield battles of the upper Q2 drivers’ preying on the low Q3 drivers went away when drivers who made it to Q3 would not even attempt a qualifying lap. Every team found roughly the same best strategy for the race when faced with the options presented.

That is not to say that the problem with F1 is that everyone is too good at what they do, but with the current rules, it certainly hurts the racing to a degree. Unpredictability comes when many variables of a race are out of the control of drivers and engineers, whose job it is to control all of the variables. The variable of gear shifting has been reduced to nil, eliminating the possibility of overtakes resulting from missed gears. Engineers have gotten tire strategy down to a science, and they all result in effectively the same strategy. Drivers are so good that they don’t make many mistakes, and the cars are all highly reliable.

Many most dramatic races we’ve seen in the last decade or so have been the result of the largest variable outside of the control of engineers and drivers, rain. Other great races happened because of big unknowns in tire quality (Canada 2010).

A possible solution? Have Pirelli provide some practice tires for free practice, some average tires just to let the teams set the cars up. Everybody qualifies on special qualifying tires. On race day, there will be two types of tires, the grip and durability of both kept secret to the drivers and engineers until the race itself. Drivers and engineers are forced to make race strategies on the fly. Perhaps a bit artificial, but not any more artificial than DRS or having the top 10 qualifiers start with used tires.

However, this would just be a band aid until the cars are fundamentally changed so that overtaking in an equal car is only highly difficult, but not impossible. F1 right now is like football/soccer with goals half as big and scoring is only possible when one team is fresh and the other is fatigued, but all players get tired at the same rate.

Refuelling would be a great addition to the current rules! It may even close the gap, like in the case of ferrari they could have short fueled the car for their prime tire stint. I have always thought that f1 cars should be able to run at their fastest setups without having to setup for high fuel loads. More qualifying type laps per race would be great!!

Another idea I’d like to see would be drs being used anywhere on the track during the race, even if it only opened say 50% and then the full 100% in the designated drs zones! We may see a lot more spin outs!! Or… A drs on the front wing also!

I agree with @keith-collantine in this regard. The racing is what’s important. I don’t really care on strategy variation not because they aren’t fascinating; but because other than changing conditions or safety cars, then it’s very hard. There is, under any set of regulations whatsoever, always a single fastest way for each circuit, car and driver to do a race distance; and I suspect teams will even have backup strategies for fastest race distance without giving up track position (for places such as Monaco) and fastest race distance with being able to overtake (such as Canada).

The cars are designed by engineers too good to have enough variation amongst themselves to provide sufficient variation in terms of strategic opportunities IMO. Ideally you’d probably want a Sauber-like team which keeps on running a stop less thanks to tyre kindness, and the more-stop strategy to be faster (so that they’re actually faster than the car ahead of them that has stopped less, so they overtake) but the variation in terms of the pace vs tyre kindness compromise of the teams is nowhere near enough for that I don’t think.

@Magnificent-Geoffrey

I love that idea of unrestricted tyre compounds.

Remove the top ten starting on the same tyre compound and the two compound per race rule, but keep the same Pirelli’s and it gives one thing back that’s been missing – Flexibility and unpredictability in strategy.