Singapore, September 2023. Carlos Sainz is leading on increasingly worn tires, with two Mercedes closing in fast on fresh rubber. Instead of pulling away, he slows down. On purpose: he keeps Lando Norris, in second, within one second of him, so the McLaren can use DRS and act as a shield between him and the Silver Arrows. Sainz wins, Norris finishes second and thanks him over the radio. A race won by going slower, in exactly the right place.

It is the most honest definition of F1 pit strategy, and of strategy in Formula 1 in general: the set of decisions engineers, strategists and driver make before and during the race to get the best possible result with what they have. When to pit and how many times, which tires to fit, how to react to rain, Safety Cars and red flags, when to ask a teammate to step aside, how to use battery energy in attack and defense. A wrong call can ruin a perfect race; a brave one can turn a Sunday that looked lost into a win.

Who decides: the pit wall, the race engineer and the factory

Strategy is built before the start. Over the Grand Prix weekend the team prepares several scenarios, usually named with letters: plan A is the one they start with and stick to if nothing unexpected happens, while plans B, C and beyond are ready-made responses to a Safety Car, a change in the weather or a tire degrading more than expected.

During the race, decisions go through the pit wall, where the team principal, the head of strategy and the engineers sit, and above all through the race engineer, the driver’s only constant link over the radio. Behind them work the operations rooms back at the factory, hundreds or thousands of miles from the track, where more engineers analyze telemetry, rivals’ lap times and the odds of a neutralization in real time. The “call”, the instruction that reaches the driver, is the last link in this chain. But the driver is not just someone who follows orders: he is the only one who can really feel the tire, and it is often the driver who asks to bring a stop forward or push it back.

The pit stop: two seconds that are worth a race

The pit stop is the main tool of strategy. A well-drilled crew changes all four tires in two to three seconds; the record belongs to McLaren, which serviced Lando Norris in 1.80 seconds at the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix. The stop itself, though, is only part of the bill: what really counts is the time lost driving down the pit lane at limited speed, which varies from track to track and is the first number a strategist looks at when deciding how many stops to make.

This calculation is behind the two most famous moves in modern Formula 1. The undercut means pitting before your rival: on new tires you are faster on the following laps and, when the other driver stops in turn, you come out ahead. The overcut is the opposite: staying out longer, making the most of clear track or tires that are still performing well, and stopping later. Which one works depends on degradation, traffic and how long new tires take to come up to temperature.

Tires: the real heart of strategy

Every strategic choice starts with the tires. On a standard weekend each driver has thirteen sets of dry tires, two hard, three medium and eight soft, and has to split them between practice, qualifying and the race. Using too many on Friday means racing on Sunday with tires that are already worn.

In the race the rule is simple to write and complicated to apply: anyone racing in the dry must use at least two different compounds, one of which must be among those the FIA designates as mandatory for the race, or face disqualification (which becomes a 30-second penalty if the race is suspended and cannot be restarted), unless they fitted intermediate or wet tires during the race. That is where one-stop, two-stop and, more rarely, three-stop races come from, depending on the asphalt, the temperatures and the driver’s ability to make the tires last. In 2025 the Monaco Grand Prix experimented with two mandatory stops; the rule was scrapped for 2026, and the choice is free again in Monte Carlo too.

The starting tire also matters, and since 2022 every driver can choose it freely. The soft gives an advantage on the opening laps but forces an earlier stop; the hard allows a longer first stint, with less performance at the start and more options later.

Rain, Safety Cars and red flags

The weather is the variable that throws any plan into crisis. More than the rain itself, what puts strategists in trouble are mixed conditions: a race that starts dry and turns wet, or a damp track that dries lap after lap. Wet tires are much slower than slicks in the dry, but slicks have no grip in the wet: the right moment to switch is decided down to the second, listening to the driver. Some take the risk and change first, hoping to gain positions; others wait one more lap so as not to waste a stop.

Then there are the neutralizations. With the Safety Car on track, the cars slow down and line up, the gaps disappear and the time lost for a pit stop drops sharply compared with a stop at racing speed. That is why, on circuits where overtaking is hard, pit walls tend to wait for a neutralization before changing tires. It is a gamble: sometimes the Safety Car never comes, sometimes it comes out right after your own stop and hands the advantage to your rivals. The Virtual Safety Car, under which everyone slows down without lining up, offers a smaller but similar discount. Finally, a red flag suspends the race and lets everyone change tires without losing time: whoever had just pitted has paid for a stop the others get for free.

Team orders: when a teammate has to step aside

The history of team orders in Formula 1 is long and full of controversy. After the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, when Rubens Barrichello handed the win to Michael Schumacher on the run to the finish line, orders that could influence the result were banned, from 2003 to 2010. The ban did not hold: at Hockenheim in 2010, the “Fernando is faster than you” message to Felipe Massa cost Ferrari a $100,000 fine, and from 2011 the rule disappeared from the regulations.

Today teams can openly ask a driver to give up a position to his teammate, to help the one fighting for the title or to attempt an attack on a rival, perhaps with the promise of giving the place back if the move does not work. Fans do not like it much, but it is one of the tools a team uses to maximize its points.

From DRS to Overtake Mode: strategy in 2026

For fifteen seasons, from 2011 to 2025, the main overtaking weapon was DRS, the movable rear wing that could be opened in dedicated zones when a driver was within one second of the car ahead. Strategy found room there too: besides Sainz in Singapore, at Jeddah in 2022 Verstappen and Leclerc took turns slowing before the detection point, because neither wanted to lead and hand the other an open wing on the straight.

In 2026 DRS is gone. The new cars have active aerodynamics that everyone can use on the straights, and a new attacking tool, Overtake Mode: a driver who crosses the detection point within the gap set by the FIA (normally one second) behind the car ahead receives, on the following lap, extra electrical energy that lets him hold maximum thrust for longer. On top of that comes Boost Mode, the maximum power available on the driver’s demand anywhere on the track, all at once or spread over the lap, useful both in attack and in defense, as long as there is charge in the battery. The result is that energy management has become a central part of strategy, lap after lap, almost as much as tires.

A team sport, even with only one person at the wheel

Strategy is perhaps the clearest proof of how much Formula 1 is a team sport. In front of the cameras there is one driver, but behind every successful pass there is a pit wall that chose the moment, a data room that ran the numbers and a crew of mechanics that stopped and released the car in two seconds. It is no coincidence that the pit stop has its own award: the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award, which Red Bull won for seven seasons in a row, from 2018 to 2024, and Ferrari claimed in 2025.

For a brand this is far from a minor detail. The pit stop, the pit wall and the team radio messages broadcast live are moments when the whole team ends up in front of the cameras, not just the driver. Anyone evaluating a partnership in this championship would do well to remember it, and to understand which of these spaces they can really occupy: we cover it in our guide to Formula 1 sponsorship, and for the rules that intertwine with strategy, here is how penalties in F1 work.