ROUND 21: 🇧🇷 Brazil
FORMULA 1 LENOVO GRANDE PRÊMIO DE SÃO PAULO 2024
Circuit stats
- Circuit name: Autódromo José Carlos Pace
- First Grand Prix: 1973
- Number of laps: 71
- Circuit Length: 4.309 km
- Race Distance: 305.879 km
- Lap record: 1:10.540 Valtteri Bottas (2018)
- 2023 winner: Max Verstappen
I don’t get the Safety Car for “teams are on the wrong tires”. Some had already switched to full wets. Surely this should be up to the teams to screw up instead of relying on the organizers to save them staying out on inters.
Even if everyone was on full wets, they bring it out for visibility and hydroplaning. I think that’s part of the reason no one switched to full wets. They knew if conditions got bad enough to need them, the SC would come out and there might be a red flag too.
At least four cars had switched to full wets at the time.
From memory, Tsunoda, Lawson, Hulk, Perez, Zhou, and I think there was 1 more. Their strategy was paying off with lap times 3s faster and that was just getting started. Sad to seen a great strategic choice like this turn to shit because teams know the race director will be overly cautious and protect teams from having to make risky strategy calls.
How do you even fix that? At this point driving on the wrong tyre is an optimal strategy. Either:
Also I’m not fooled by drivers moaning about how wets suck and have no grip; as long as inters are even 0.1 a lap faster than wets, everyone will want to run inters. I don’t think there’s place for two wet weather compounds since everyone will pick the ‘faster’ one regardles of weather.