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The Monaco GP race has left us with few headlines beyond those we had in qualifying. Almost all predictions came true and an early red flag prevented us from seeing the pit stop game that could have added spice to the battle for victory.
The red flag at the start of the GP, caused by Kevin Magnussen’s accident with Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg, meant that all drivers were able to change tyres ‘for free’ in the pitlane before the restart to save them from doing their compulsory pitstop while in action.
At a track like Monaco where degradation is very low coupled with an extremely slow race pace to manage the tyres, the teams knew that the main target was to reach the end of the race with the same tyres after 77 laps and stopping was not an option.
In this scenario, Charles Leclerc, Oscar Piastri, Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris were on the hard tyre after the red flag. Behind them, George Russell, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton were on the medium tyre. Immediately behind, Yuki Tsunoda and Alex Albon on the hard tyre and closing the top 10, Pierre Gasly on the medium tyre.
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The first of these scenarios was avoided by Ferrari. Leclerc at the front controlled the pace of the top four to his liking and prevented the pace from being much higher than that of the chasing group. The Italian team was not interested in pushing for two reasons: to keep the tyres alive for the whole race and to not give away a free pit stop to McLaren that could have put them in trouble.
The second was out of Ferrari’s control and it materialised. By lap 35, the gap between Hamilton and Tsunoda was already over 23 seconds and the Mercedes driver had a free pit stop. But Hamilton was still a little too far behind Verstappen to try to attack with the undercut and there were still many laps to go before he could comfortably hold on with a new set of tyres.
