Lotus and strategy - Warning may contain spoilers

[patmahe]

Just a thought. What is going on at Lotus in terms of strategy. On more than one occasion over the past couple of seasons we have seen them throw away strong finishing positions to try to avoid making a pitstop with 10 or 12 laps to go only to lose all those positions anyway and then make a pitstop with 2 laps to go, it seems like madness!

Now of course its very easy for me to be wise in hindsight, but the signs are all there, if you are currently 2-3 seconds per lap slower than you were at your best point in the race and there are 10 laps to go then just pit.

That way you can at worst consolidate a decent position and who knows, since you are now one of the cars on fresh tyres at then end of the race you may even make up places in the last few laps.

I know the long stint strategy worked really well for Grosjean today, but surely you could write a simple piece of software to monitor lap times and do a calculation based on existing tyre data that triggers an alarm if things look to be going wrong.

With all the millions that get spent on all aspects of F1 is seems daft to be making such basic mistakes, especially when its a team like Lotus who are on the cusp of becoming a top team.

Would be interested to hear the thoughts of others on this.

[Piginapoke]

Lotus rely on their belief that tyre degradation is lower of their car than others, and their ability to run the softer tyre at the end for longer. You would have to say it works out more often than not for them

[patmahe]

I agree, but when it isn't working out they seem to be very slow to react. Why not simply accept the situation and limit the damage done by pitting.

[vonuber]

IIRC Kimi's tyres were not that much different in age terms than Grosjean's. Maybe Kimi spent longer in dirty air and wore them out quicker?

[Kaiser_Wull]

vonuber said:

IIRC Kimi's tyres were not that much different in age terms than Grosjean's. Maybe Kimi spent longer in dirty air and wore them out quicker?

They were six or seven laps older, so that was one factor. Another factor was that he had brake problems for the first twenty laps and had to adjust the brake bias to the front, which wouldn't have helped the front tyres.