F1 Is a Strategy Game, and Ferrari Are Bad at It

If you are getting into Formula 1 (and it's one of the fastest growing sports in the US so it’s a good bet a lot of you are) the strategic elements of it can be hard to parse. The race telecast focuses on leading drivers whipping through corners, or cuts away to battles for position as they erupt among mid-pack cars, but it has always struggled to tell the story of race strategy. It will give you intervals showing how a lead is growing or shrinking, but that’s really just the effect of strategy playing out rather than the strategy itself.

Fortunately, Ferrari has dedicated its 2022 season to illustrating how F1 strategy works by repeatedly screwing up, and on Sunday at the Hungarian Grand Prix they taught their masterclass. In the middle of a fight with their championship rival Red Bull, Ferrari drew a contrast between the two teams that was so clear as to be blinding, throwing the elements of F1 strategy into a more stark relief than you ever see in the average race. Someone or a lot of someones may ultimately lose their jobs at Ferrari over this, but the sport will owe them a debt for educating a generation of new fans with what might be the worst race strategy decision in at least 20 years.

The stakes could not have been higher, either, as Sunday’s race critical to restoring Ferrari’s fortunes and championship hopes. The team once ruled F1 from an empire built by the legendarily consistent and competitive driving of Michael Schumacher, the technical genius of engineer Ross Brawn, and the hardball politics of Ferrari boss Jean Todt. But as those figures receded from the scene, Red Bull and then Mercedes seized control of the sport and left Ferrari in a state of perpetual disarray as one regime after another attempted to rebuild the team and achieve its former glory. 

Now, however, with Mercedes struggling with a new set of rules, Ferrari have built their most competitive car in years (we’ll leave aside the 2019 car which we might call the Steroid Era Ferrari) and have spent the season locked in a close battle with Red Bull. The team has been hamstrung by setbacks however: their drivers had made mistakes at critical moments, and Ferrari’s engine has increased in power at the expense of reliability, with the team’s cars breaking down several times this year. That has allowed Red Bull to build a lead over them, and Ferrari really needed a favorable result in Hungary not just to stay in the fight with Red Bull but also to ensure the slow-but-steady Mercedes team does not become a major threat for second place in the season standings. This has ramifications beyond pride as F1’s pay structure rewards the top finishing teams with more money while those at the back of the grid get the least.

Fortunately, Ferrari were handed a golden opportunity this weekend as neither Red Bull car qualified well for the race, meaning they would be starting well behind the Ferraris at a track where passing is often said to be difficult. At the start of the race, Ferrari had cars in second and third place, worth 18 and 15 points respectively. Red Bull was in 10th and 11th, with 10th worth just a single point at race’s end. While it was unlikely the Red Bulls would remain mired back there, there was at least a decent possibility that Ferrari could make decent inroads into Red Bull’s points lead.

The only apparent wrinkle in this scenario was the fact that Mercedes’ George Russell had driven an improbably great qualifying lap to start in first place. The Mercedes is a car with a lot of weaknesses this year, but the team have mitigated a lot of them since the season began and Hungary is an old, smallish track that masks what is an embarrassing fatal flaw for a race car: the Mercedes is a bad car at high speeds. So while the Ferraris appeared to be the fastest car overall in Hungary, Russell’s Mercedes was competitive enough that it would jeopardize a golden opportunity for a race win.

There was one other wrinkle as well, though it was not unique to Ferrari. After weeks of punishingly hot Climate Change Grands Prix Sponsored by CryptoPonzi and Your Friends in the Oil Industry (Net Zero by 2030!), race day in Hungary was cool and cloudy with intermittent spatters of rain. Since F1 tires are most sensitive to heat, only performing well within an optimal temperature band, the chilly, slightly damp track tossed a curveball at all the teams.

In the name of making the sport more interesting, F1 long ago ceased to be a sport about developing and deploying cutting-edge, optimally performing tires. Instead, the sport went to a single tire supplier, Pirelli, with the brief of creating several different tire compounds that would have different performance properties, chief among them their hardness. Pirelli make five different dry weather racing slicks, ranging from the ultra-soft C5 to the hard-as-rock C1. At each track, only three of these compounds are available and for that weekend they are the hard, medium, or soft tires. In general, soft tires perform the best across a single-lap but wear the fastest, and can be rendered almost useless in extreme heat as they heat up so quickly that they can overheat and start losing grip almost immediately. Hard tires are the slowest tires in terms of pace but are theoretically more durable, though in cold weather they can wear faster because they never get to optimal grip levels and so the car ends up putting more strain on them because it is constantly struggling to find traction. Each driver has to use two of these compounds during a race, with the idea from F1 being that the strengths and weaknesses of each tire in different conditions, tossed into a blender with the different traits of the cars and drivers, makes for a more interesting race.

Having hung that gun above the fireplace, the first half of the race went reasonably according to plan for Ferrari. While they were not able to get ahead of Russell’s Mercedes at the start of the race, he never quite managed to lose them and after the initial cycle of pit stops, he was clearly a sitting duck for the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc. Russell had started the race on the Soft tire and once he had stopped for a Medium tire and the Ferraris had done the same, he had an evidently slower pace. The two drivers fought an exciting battle around the track for several laps before Leclerc finally passed Russell and looked poised for a race win.

The problem was that in all that fighting, Ferrari’s pace had been held back by Russell’s, meaning that as Red Bulls' defending champion Max Verstappen was advancing toward the front of the field from tenth place, he was also closing the physical distance to the Ferraris. The comfortable lead they had enjoyed at the start of the race was now distinctly tighter. Additionally, because they had gone to the Medium tire at the first pit stop, they were still obliged to use a second tire compound before the end of the race. Verstappen, who had started on the Softs (fitting for a driver who needed to advance rapidly through the field) did not have the same obligation.

On Lap 37, which is basically the last moment of the race before Ferrari spotted the iceberg ahead of them, Leclerc held a seven-second lead on Verstappen. On Lap 38, Verstappen made his second and final stop for Mediums, opening up a wider gap to Leclerc due to the time required for the pit stop and the slow drive at the pit lane speed limit, but sticking Ferrari with an ugly conundrum. Verstappen would have fresher and faster tires and would steadily eat into that lead, so that when Leclerc did stop, he would come out of the pits behind Verstappen. Worse, given that it was a 70 lap race, it was way too early to stop for the Soft tires. They would not make it to the end.

There are parts of this that are advantaged by hindsight: Ferrari should not have run back-to-back Medium stints and left themselves vulnerable to this kind of pressure, and you might argue that the race had already been lost by the time Red Bull chose to apply it. However, the fact they had no good options does not really excuse the fact that they knowingly chose a terrible one in response to Red Bull. Their strategy had committed them to finishing the race on Softs and the only viable path open to them was to stick to that plan. Instead, they panicked.

On lap 39, in response to Verstappen, Leclerc went into the Ferrari pits and came out with Hard tires. Under normal circumstances that would have been a fine response to Verstappen: the Hard tire should outlast the Medium and would give Ferrari the best chance at holding back the Red Bull driver’s impending challenge for the lead. But it had already been amply demonstrated by other teams who had tried it that the Hard tire was not working on Sunday. Ferrari had almost 40 laps of evidence to go by when they called Leclerc in to junk his Medium tires early in favor of a tire that was now certain to be a terrible performer.

The ensuing fight was over before it began. Leclerc could barely drive the Ferrari around the track. Before the swap to the Hards, Leclerc had been lapping slightly faster the Verstappen and with a car that was steadily burning off fuel there was a decent chance Ferrari might be able to to him what Russell had done to Leclerc, denying him the full potential of his new tires and opening a possibility that Ferrari might get him with a late switch to Softs. Instead, Leclerc’s lap times became completely inconsistent with Verstappen sometimes drawing away at a pace of two seconds a lap. You could see on the telecast that the Ferrari went from being one of the fastest and most agile cars on the track to struggling with the most straightforward corners. After 15 miserable laps, Leclerc pitted for Softs and fell from second place to sixth, finishing behind his teammate and both Red Bulls after leading the race while Verstappen had an untroubled drive to victory after leaving Leclerc in the dust.

The sight of Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto leaving the pit wall as the day unraveled around him provided a visual metaphor for the unequal fight Ferrari has found itself in this season. Ahead of them they have Red Bull, an aggressive team that looks for ways to give Verstappen an opportunity to win. Behind them, they have Mercedes, a team that has thrived on the consistently high performance of Lewis Hamilton and the reliability of its cars. Meanwhile, when faced with a direct challenge from Red Bull, Ferrari gambled on an observably bad tire rather than put the race on their driver’s shoulders or trust that their previous plans might hold up against Red Bull’s. Even with a lead and their season on the line, Ferrari remains a team stuck in damage limitation mode, less interested in winning races than they are consumed by the fear of losing them.