General overview
The Monaco Grand Prix was won, as expected, by the driver who grabbed pole on Saturday, confirming once again the almost total importance of qualifying on the Monaco circuit. Thus, it was Norris who won, together on the podium with home driver Leclerc and Piastri. An objectively atypical race that will probably leave several question marks for next year given the mandatory two pit stops that caused several atypical strategies and several teams that tried to optimize the result by trying to favor first one driver and then the other through a very anomalous strategy: while one of the drivers was acting as a stopper, blocking all the cars behind him, his teammate was grinding out faster laps to have a gap such that after the pit stop he could get back in front of his teammate. This favored some teams, first and foremost Racing Bulls and Williams, but penalized alters like Mercedes, who found themselves bottled up in traffic.
Analyzing the values in the field with the ranking chart shows that once again, McLaren was the first force in the field, followed by Ferrari and Red Bull. The analysis was conducted by sorting the teams according to the median of laptimes, thus trying to disregard the average value of laptimes, which are highly dependent on the anomalous strategies in the principality race. Indeed, a large standard deviation can be seen, indicating a very scattered distribution of lap times. The violin also gives a fairly clear picture of the anomaly: The first 5 finishers have a fairly similar fiddle, although the first three had a slightly better pace than the others. Behind, on the other hand, it can be seen that The two Racing Bulls plus Ocon have a much higher lap time violin than the Williams: they have overall been running on higher lap times, to favor the strategy analyzed above, and despite this they still managed to have an edge over the Williams who have an overall faster lap time sequence and rank ahead of them.
Race strategy
On the strategy front, everyone implemented the two mandated stops by alternating mostly medium and hard, with some daring the soft tire for a few laps. Of note certainly first and foremost were the Racing Bulls who performed the strategy of leaving one of the drivers to act as a stopper and the other to grind out faster laps to have time to stop in the box, change tires and return to the track ahead of their teammate and then resume grinding out fast laps for the second stop. Downstream of that, the roles were reversed once one of the two drivers unmarked the double pit stop. Following this, Williams also succeeded in such a strategy.
Focus on drivers’ lap times
Even comparing the lap times shows several anomalies, especially in the first two stints, where it is difficult to analyze the race pace, since it was related more to strategic logic to manage the mandatory double pit stop rather than for pure racing. A little more can be said last stint, after the double pit stop, in which we can see a race pace of Norris’ McLaren better than Leclerc’s by about two tenths per lap, with Piastri slower at the beginning of the last stint but gradually getting closer to the leaders towards the end of the race as they were stuck behind Verstappen and this made it easier for the Australian to come back. Verstappen tried to delay entering the pits for the second pit stop, hoping for some event that might favor him, such as SC, VSC, or even a red flag. The strategy did not pay off, however, and he eventually had to pit and relegate to fourth position.
Conclusions
We can say that this new format has changed the Monaco Grand Prix a bit from the past but it leaves several question marks, especially for the strategies that some teams have employed to favor their drivers, with one acting as a stopper to facilitate the other and allow him to build up a gap that would allow him a pit stop. There are sure to be discussions about this, and it is easy to think of changes for next year. Now watch out on Sunday for the Spanish Grand Prix, where new technical regulations will debut that many believe could bring some changes in the hierarchies.