Tony. Michael, I was thinking for this episode, let's go with Plan D but reverse points three and four, skip over five, finishing with two.
How does that sound? Please stop talking.
Break from My Heart Podcast one on one Studios and Sports Illustrated Studios.
This is choosing sides.
One.
Wow Wow, talk to me goose.
Blake, welcome, give us a little bit of insight of your career journey, who you are and what you do today.
My name is Blake Kinsey, former F one performance engineer turned content creator White Size Chop.
Wow.
So Michael Tony.
Today, with the help from our amazing expert Blake Kinsey, I will put forward to you that the absolute best kind of F one fan you can be is a game strategist. That racing strategy is the most fascinating thing that I think you can imagine, And it's just the right prism for you to approach you F one fandom.
Okay, Well, I believe you and I trust you, but you can't control what's in my heart.
Well we'll say about that.
Oh, if you want to watch a Formula one race and understand what's going on, you have two options. You can watch the race lap by lap and observe what's
happening and say it wasn't that great. But one of the best things about Formula one is the suspense, and a lot of people get a lot of satisfaction of having an understanding of how the game can unfold and the variables, and they want to know what's going to happen next because they're probably watching it with their friend and it's like, watch out for Carlos, here's he needs to stop soon for a new times And without that kind of context, you kind of sitting there thinking what's
going to happen next. I think Formula one very much has elements of chess, especially when you consider strategy. You know you can have a plan and if somebody does a different move and you do not react to that move, you can end up at a disadvantage and it forces your hand and it can put you in a difficult spot. You know that you may not have all the information you need to make that decision. But do you make a pit stop to cover that car or do you stay out and stick to plan A? Which one pays off?
I keep hearing all this talk about race strategy, Plan A, Plan B, Plan C is an F one A race start here, finish here doesn't seem very complicated to me.
So yes, if one is a race, start here, finish here, But there's so much that happens in between that formation lap and that checkered flag, which is the flag that gets waived when they cross the finish line. It's also
so much more than just the driver. So during F one weekends you will hear the commentators or on checks, but it's like myself say things like, oh, probably going to be expecting our one or two stop strategy, or we've taken the data from the previous race last year and we've got a better understanding of where we're going.
You're gonna hear a lot of that. And the strategies are very much tied to things like tire compound choices, the different racetracks, the weather forecast, and we all dedicate a whole episode and dive deeper into the tires.
Please, I can't wait. That episode is where the rubber meets the road.
Out moving swiftly on. There's also things during the race weekend that you can't foresee for so there's these unforseeable things like did we have a crash, do we have a safety cart, do we have a virtual safety cart. Is the weather completely different than what we expected? You'll see during the free practice sessions or quality. Maybe it's you know, sunshine and hot weather, and then for the race on Sunday it's your rain and cloudy and gloomy.
Teams could also have a bad pit stop strategy. Something in the wheel gun could have blocked in and they don't have a two or three second pit stop, but they have a four, five, six, seven picks up again which flrows everything out the window.
Ricardo is sat there waiting. Did he make the call, did the team make the call? Whoever made the call? The tires weren't ready.
So there's a myriad of things that come into play. The other thing to note is that the head of the team strategy and their whole team are sometimes planning months, if not sometimes actually years in advance in terms of what this race is going to look like. They know. The idea for the strategy team is that when they land on a Wednesday or Thursday for the race, they know what their strategy is or what their strategy options are going to be.
I have some thoughts, yeah, but my first question is you said the head of strategy does that mean there's multiple people devoted to the game strategy.
Yeah, so Formula one teams have several strategists. There is a person who is responsible for, you know, taking all the information you have, you know, assistant strategists that are looking at a specific car or looking at specific competitor's car in relation to you, and they're helping that person gather all the information they need. You're also taking information that the drivers talking to the race engineer. The race engineer is asking the driver about can these tires do
five more laps? Because despite all the data in the world, we do not have particularly good metrics to say, hey, can these tires do five more laps? You literally have to ask the human behind the wheel, and all that information gets fed into the strategist and they will make a call. Very often with most teams, the team principle, especially for when there's a decision which could have a
negative impact on the other car. You present those concisely to the team principle on the pitwall and they say yes, go ahead or no, I don't want that as an outcome.
Right.
The idea of the ability to predict what happens in Formula One in a race in terms of a strategy is absolutely down to very high levels of uncertainty. The thing that you do not know, particularly with any certainty, is how the tires will behave during the race.
How can you possibly drive this car with the tire in that condition?
And if you're on the roads and a policeman sor pull you over.
To get really geeky, you talk about something called a open air simulation where you basically take your expectations of the lap times that the tire is likely to do as a function of its age, and you run through a bunch of simulations like what if we stop on this lap, but if we stop on lip lap?
What if you fit this tire?
You run a bunch of simulations and you say, what is the fastest way to the end of this race? And that kind of tells you a good starting point.
One of the strategists once said, we're looking at one hundred thousand versions of permutations possible. We can't gain all of them, but we've got based on our experience and our knowledge, we've got a pretty good idea of what are those top ten, top fifty permutations that we should be spending energy and time on.
I guess they just want to feel like they're not surprised exactly.
Yeah, so when they're looking by the way, I mean, this feels important to say, but kind of makes sense when they're looking at all of this state and they're not sat there anymore crunching it pen a piece of paper. But then they're using all of these incredible simulators to simulate all the different options available at them. But that also leads to why we have so many tech partners in Formula one, the likes of Cognizant and Salesforce and you name it, because they help these teams aggregate all
of that data. So I think that's also why we have more data analysts in Formula one today than we used to back in the day.
Yeah, I can only imagine eighty years ago.
That wasn't the case.
That wasn't the case. There was probably much more of what I'm talking about. Here's the keys, go as fast as you can.
You know I'm going to say this, but you bring up a phenomenal test, which is I was once asked where does the driver put the key once they get into the car. And the fun fact is fact, even though it sounds logical, I don't think I've ever heard anyone actually tell me this Formula one doesn't have a key, because it takes four or five people to actually kickstart a Formula one, in turn the car, and to turn it on.
I didn't assume the car was turned on with some or in back of munich. Or you couldn't even have like a lucky rabbit's foot on your keychain because it'd be too much weight.
Too much way that you do have drivers that stick a picture of their wives or okay, the Virgin Mary.
I don't know if I'd want to be looking at my wife at two hundred and twenty miles an hour, I might it might be better to look at the Virgin Mary.
Time.
You've gathered some data about your car. You understand what you think is likely to happen with the hard, medium and soft compound if you fit them during the race, and you've made some predictions about how they'll behave. But there's a range to those characteristics. You've also, in preparation of your strategy, made assumptions of how your competitors will behave in the race in terms of their tires, and then add the uncertainty that you have about your own car.
Couple that with the uncertainty of your competitor's car, and then you predict that you go into the race by lap five. Very often your entire stre agive plan is blown out of the window, and then it becomes about operational prowess reading stuff that's outside of the data, reading the context, or most accurately or most correctly extrapolating from the data set that you have that's been completely destroyed
that you thought is correct, it's now completely wrong. The ability to make observations about stuff that's happening on a sector bi sector basis, not a lap by lap basis. Look at how other people are having how is how is the other team behaving on the medium tire because they've been on it for two laps and that might
be the right tire to be on right now. Did you observe that and did you make that note that it's you know, the medium tire is actually you know what, it's a lot better than we thought it was before the race. The strategy is now changed in a complete different dimension. You also have other variables, like what happens when the safety car comes out. Teams at every point they let's say you've got your original plan and you've had a little bit of change, the tires are behaving differently,
so you've adjusted your plan. You've also got to say, I've made all these adjustments, but now what happens if we have a safety car in two laps? What do we do? Don't you don't wait for the safety car
to happen and make the decision. You also have to say, if it's a safety car, what are we doing in the next five laps, and continually update that as your strategy plan evolves, because those are the kind of things like you know, when there's a safety car, your pit stop loses you left time, but you might give up track position, and do you take that or not? Can you can you go to the end from that stop? Do you have to make two stops if you stop here?
It's all of it is hinged on uncertainty, and it's reacting to that. Strategy is fascinating completely, and it's the fascinating bit which makes the sport enjoyable is the chaos that you have in the strategy.
I'm gonna also rephrase game strategy as overthinking. I mean, I feel like, are they giving room for the athlete to drive the car and feel.
It you know what.
That's actually one of my favorite things about the sport is at what point do you stop strategizing and planning and do you just race or do you figure out like this is what we have, like go for it? And at what point also do you trust the driver versus what's happening. So you'll see people on the.
Pit will say, is any one else report in rain?
We're expecting rain, and the driver's like, there's rain coming down on my helmet and my visor. What you're talking about, we're expecting rain, the rain is happening, sounds like it's just you and supporting the rain.
I suspect it might be the sweat.
And that is a trust that gets built over time before between the race engineer and the actual driver. The other component of that that the race engineer knows is is this a rookie driver or is this a driver been driving for ten to fifteen years. The reality is if it's a driver that's been driving for ten fifteen years, you trust their gut instinct and what they're telling you from what they're seeing. But that's also part of the communication.
So to your point, actually, the race engineer is the only person really that talks to the driver, and the driver knows who is giving him that information. But behind the race engineer there's a myriad and a myriad of people. Sure, one important thing that's actually also somewhat tied to the cost cap is you can't bring the entire team to the race weekend, so you generally have those five six
people on the pitwall. Then in the garage you've got a bunch more engineers who are data analysts and strategists and looking at what the data that they're getting on their computers. But then there's a lot of people back at what they call quote unquote which sounds really fancy, mission control. Most of those teams are back in the UK and they look at all the info that's gathered and then they send that back to the people on
track or on the pitwall. But here's also the interesting thing is you both need the people who are removed from the race and the people on the pitwall and the driver because you want the people who are removed from everything that are able to take a step back and go wait, wait, hold on a minute. We have experience with this racetrack, we have experience with this web forecast. This is what it's teaching us. Then you've got the people at the track and go no, no, circumstances have changed,
and then you've got the actual driver. There's a benefit to having those people remote, Tony.
I'm getting a message in my earpiece here from mission control. They want us to pause for some advertisements.
Roger that we'll be.
Right back.
And back from our break and diving right into the strategy episode.
I'm just not as much. I don't I'm not buying in as much to game strategy. It's not that you're not doing a good job convincing someone. It's just the athlete brain in me is saying you've got to just let these drivers react and race and do what they do best.
But you've just said the magical word, which is react. So to your point, that driver is not alone on the track. They're there with nineteen other racers, and so they're not just reacting to the plan and what they think is going to be the best race strategy, but they're also having to look at what the other hey their teammates, is going to do, but also what the
other drivers. So it's also about understanding the strategies of the nine other teams, something that I had never realized there are people who sold job or a big chunk of their job is listening to all of the other team radios.
That'd be fun, that's fine, but you also know that someone's listening to your radio.
Yeah, all the teams can hear all the driver's radio while they're on the circuit, you know, if they're talking about some specific you know, set up stuff in the garage. Once their cars are plugged into the umbilical we call them, which transfers all the data. You can't hear the intercom then, but when the drivers are on the track, you can hear everything, and you will often hear other teams talking in code.
Brabo Zito seven on bliss, Brabo Zito seven on.
We're on Plan A, we're on Plan F.
It's too late for Plan G. Take this work.
And sometimes you have to ask the driver very directly. You know, there's no prescripted ways to ask how's this? And you say, how's this tire behaving?
Would you like to have a new medium to go through the traffic or prefer new heart question?
And the driver has to say, this tire is destroyed. It's five laps old. The front right tire is gone. You can't hide that from your competitors.
Come on, there's got to be some disinformation being thrown around.
Sometimes you can have a little bit of disinformation in terms of pitstop dummy calls.
So you know how when they come out for the pit stops, everyone's already in place and there's about twenty and it's a fair amount of people. It's twenty people get ready to do a pit stop. But sometimes you will hear on the radio saying stay put, stay puts, don't move, don't move. The idea for that is they're not giving any warning that they're about to send their driver into box, right, so they're asking the rest of the team in the garage to not look like they're
getting ready, and so that's part of it. I just think it's so fun. Same with the drivers, they'll say hold it, hold it, hold it, and at the last minute the box box box.
Box, I stay okay, just got it.
There's a little bit of that, But honestly, teams struggle sometimes to tell the truth and get everything right. They're not gonna play too many games and risk that going wrong. And like, oh, we were just joking. I thought we talked about that in the.
Meeting, I was at the entry man in trouble.
Big risk.
Yeah, I mean it would be really fun to hear the communication between an NFL football coach and the quarterback. And that's what this feels like. Yes and f One one of my favorite parts of the whole thing, besides trying to figure out what S, M and H meant thanks to all the was the was the radio communication and now I am a communication major important to me and it's very important that people in my life are good communicators, not just emotional communicators, actual words.
What do you want?
Clarity? And that is so important at this level because you're going twohundred miles.
An hour to the point here where you don't just it's not with your intonation that you guess that it's a question, but they actually fell out.
You do five more laps question question.
I love that. The other thing that's interesting military.
Teams have spent time with experts that are from military backgrounds focusing on communication protocols and loops, so that you know, the idea being say the most information you can and the fewest words with no ambiguity in your message.
So boks, now books box, Now, how's the ballots?
How's the ballots, how's the balance, every touch you know, and then the engineer knows what to do with that.
Okays?
Did the wealth of information and context you get from that is very clear. So that's that's going back to the point of you know, the driver and engineer speaking a language. And that's not only that, that's clear communication between the driver and engineer. To add a little bit more context to that, when when let's say, my old job was performance engineer, and my job was to feed the race engineer with very specific information about the driver's
performance and the car's performance. The race engineer also needs to talk to the strategist, He needs to talk to the control systems engineer, the tire technician who's preparing the tires. So if I'm going to tell my race engineerage, I don't have two minutes to tell a message that's a lap and a half. I'm going to tell him whatever message I need to tell him in less than five seconds. Questions have to be clear, Statements have to be clear. The brakes are on fire, stop the car now is
a very clear message. You know that. Those are the kind of things. So the breake calipers are over the critical threshold. We have to do something now, you know, that's a that's a that's a very critical message that you need to be clear and concise intonation clarity.
Well, if you're Ferrari, you actually say question.
Can you do ten more laps with your set question?
You know, here's here's a good thing. Talking about communication, Ferrari get a lot of abuse for when you hear the race engineer apply to the driver, the driver will ask the race engineer question, I.
Think the fuck?
You know. The race engineer says.
Good, check out, okay, copy that we are taking it.
And people have made a meme about that. But that is a spectacular message. That message says I've heard you, I've understood the question, and I'm asking the people who are experts at that thing to look into that thing for you on it. You know, because if you ignore the driver, the drivers driving around one hundred percent flat out steam coming out of the ears, did engine you hear me?
Was my message? Clear?
So we're checking and usually you know, the mean misses out when they come back know everything's fine, no, no, no, and then the car catches on fire. No no, no.
Sounds like race engineers would make phenomenal husbands. I've heard you. I'm actioning your request. I'll be right back.
I'm choosing to ignore you now.
At least you know what's happening.
I would assume drivers are not encouraged to text to text and drive.
Not expected to check your emails during the race.
I've said a lot of emails while driving. I hate I hate to know.
We had another thing. We hope our listeners will not take an example of from Michael.
The thing that I love about all of this is most people's first language is in English.
Right.
Everyone just speaks bad English and everything gets lost in communication and translation. And it's kind of wild that these drivers are expected to make decisions on communication that the beat of a second.
Do they all agree to use English just because it's the most universal, or do they have to?
They have to Two reasons for that. One is broadcast rights, so that everyone who tunes in can actually get it in this what they call the default language.
Which is English.
I believe the two accepted most widely accepted languages across the paddock is actually English, French and Italian a lot because of Ferrari.
Right.
But as we discussed, hasantoness Andomobile is actually a French federation, So French is a big you know, a big, big language throughout the paddock.
As well, even like communication. Yeah, this human component is so important in this sport. Yes, that's pretty cool. Yes, that's pretty cool. You know in the sport I come from tennis. The coach they're now allowed to coach. That's a new and they're kind of just they're kind of going like move forward, you know, they do the thing with their hand or it's like back up. But it's like it's like Caveman communicating. You listen to an F one race and it's like they have secret codes they've
met on what plan this means? You know, it's at such a heightened level. I think if we were all honest with ourselves, we would admit that when we drive our cars and talk on the phone, we're bad at both. I'm bad on the phone and I'm bad driving or I'm worse, like it's made me worse. Maybe not a bad driver on the phone, but I'm not as a tune. And these drivers are driving competitive professionally for money two hundred miles an hour and having a very direct, quick conversation with somebody.
It's a skill. The ability to drive a racing car at two hundred plus miles an hour, you know, insane cornering and breaking forces on the body, feeling what's happening. They're physically exerting themselves in there, perceiving what the car is doing and how the car is behaving, and then they're thinking of something else that the engineer asked them about a corner ago, replying to that while still continually processing all that information as they're going around the track.
And we refer to that as bandwidth or CPU. That a driver has. A driver that's able to drive quickly, perceive what the car is doing, be able to tell an engineer what the car is doing if they're asked, and then also engage in a conversation about something else is happening. Drivers that have a high bandwidth or high big CPU, they can do all of that. Some drivers
might struggle a little bit at first. For example, I talked to Liam Lawson the other day about his first time driving the Alpha TOWERI and he told me that he spent the entire time between when he knew that he was going to drive the Alpha Tower car until he got into the car talking to the engineers about the switches and settings, an operation of the steering wheel in the car.
Can you learn that? Is that a skill that you can acquire? You don't, or you do? You come to the table with that skill.
I think you learn it once you get really good at the driving the car fast bit, your CPU load reduces and then you have more capacity to take on board other things. But we've even seen max or staping at times. Don't tell me lat of times. Leave me alone. I need to get to the end.
Please stop talking about it. The breaking.
This is why I can't wait. And this is cheeky, but this is why I can't wait for us to have actually more women on the grid because they're phenomenal at multitasking, and so I'm just like, if men are capable of doing that, just you wait until the women who are so used to multitasking come there and who have great communication skills.
Well, I was going to add a little communication dig there, but that's something we'll say for a season three.
Yeah, we'll see.
Yeah, you said like one stop, two stops. That's referring to pit stops, correct, And why is that such a big difference because the pit stops I've seen a Formula one are under two seconds.
So there's two ways to look at the pit stop. There's the pit stop which is the changing of the wheels. Nowadays we don't refuel and we don't change anything else unless there's a crash and you need to change the wing as well.
So it we're just because they're not allowed to refuel.
Right, not allowed to refuel. That was banned and brought back then band the gap mostly for safety reasons. Just we had some actually yos for staff and Max with Stappen's father got into a terrible pit stop crash refueling moment which wasn't pretty.
Flash Oh my goodness me, Well now, just let's keep calm.
Didn't stop him from sending his son.
Didn't wait, So you're racing on the same tank of gas the whole time.
Yes, And you bring up another point, which is when we're thinking about the permutations of the strategy, you need to account for the car in fact, where the car
gets light and light. So that's crazy, which is why, by the way, if you've ever looked when they do their times during quality or free practice, sess they're doing it on a much lighter tank because they're only using what they need for that quality session, which means also that the car is lighter, which means they can go a little bit faster.
I mean, I've looked at these cars. I don't see how they could fit enough gas to go three hundred kilometers at that at that highest speed.
It's interesting and I'm we will need experts to help us on this.
Finally.
Nice to have an expert around.
Yeah.
Fuel strategy was one of my old jobs when I was a performance engineer at the track. So my job was to say how much fuel do we need to put in the car? Are we going to have to save fuel during this race and communicate that clearly with the engineering drivers say, hey, we filled the tanks and you're going to have to lift and coasts at the end of every straight for the start of the race to save fuel, you know, and that's a really important thing.
Lifting and coasting is a very efficient way to save fuel without losing lap time. And that's your goal. Go as least slow as possible, right, So you know that is fine, and then you say, right, well, we're saving fe fue following this car. You know, we're not going as quickly as we thought, We're not burning as much fuel. How does that impact our fuel strategy? Okay, do we you know what, We're going to not have to save fuel later in the race as a result of following
this car or something else has happened. Or let's say again, going back to the slow car. Let's say that you're five years ago in your car at the back of the field. You're not going to do the entire race distance. You might finish a lap down so you can take literally one whole lapse worth of fuel out.
Of the car.
Do you do that or not? Because if there's a safety car, you might be back on the lead lap, but you will have saved fuel under the safety car, so there's all sorts of kuld it would have should us in the very rarely I think in modern Formula one can you be a hero by being aggressive on fuel because there is no refueling.
You also need to ensure that you finished a race with at least one litter of fuel in your tank so that the FIA that bring back the FIA can test to ensure that they're using the right kind of fuel that they will allow you to use. If you do not finish the race and you don't still have a liter of fuel your race is done for.
Right, lots of pickup on the way, lots of pickup slow on the way in safe you safe?
That's very cool. Yeah, insane planning to have it be that way.
That's it.
Yeah.
Going back to the pit stops though, yes, two aspects to know about the pit stops. You've got the actual pit stop changing of the tires, which that is generally sub two seconds, that's what they aim for. I think the fastest here was one point eight second.
Change all four wheels in one point eight seconds. Can we stop for a second just to appreciate that.
Why don't we actually stop for one point eight seconds? So ready and we're done.
Boom.
Then you've got the actual pit stop time, which is going into the pit lane driving slower because you have to obviously load in coming out, and that's round fifteen to twenty seconds. So there's two ways of looking at So when you think about a one pit stop or two pit stop, it also depends on which tie you've got on. You have to change your tires at once and do soft compound or hard compound or medium compound.
And there's a whole conversation that we will have about that in the tire episode or to do it, but you basically map out that on a soft tire they will last less long, but you will go faster than on a hard compound tire. And so this is some part of the game theoryus, do we do soft tires where we can faster, but we're definitely gonna have to do two pit stops to then change them on to something else, Or do we start with hard tires where they're going to last a lot longer, but we're gonna
go not as fast. And so you're trying to game also what everyone else is doing, which is why when you watch a race you will see next every name if they've got a h or if they've got an s an M to tell you what tires they are.
Right, Well, yeah, it's a lot.
It a lot.
I do wonder there's so many more people personnel staff than the driver. Yeah, but the driver actually has in this case his hands on the wheel. Is the driver just a pawn in this game? I mean, clearly, these are super ego athletes who believe they should be at the helm of a rocket ship. Ye, so you got to let them do their thing. But basically you're saying the game strategist is like, hey, do this turn left here? You're pitting here. So if F one is a chess game,
then these drivers are just the pawns. Is that what you're saying, No, I let me just check in with the game strategists and I'll do whatever they tell me.
That is a great, great question, because at the end of the day, the driver can say I would like to do forty laps on this soft tire. It's like, hey, buddy, we've looked at your teammates or your competitors. They're doing fifteen laps on that tire. You could do sixteen. If you do twenty laps on this tire, you're going to lose four positions done. You know that those are the kind of conversations and through time you build up poor
between the driver and engineer. And at the same time, also the drivers have a reasonable understanding of expectations and then leave it to the engineers to help refine those expectations as they learn more during a race or during a season. But yeah, the drivers for sure have ultimately say and very many times you will do things that don't make sense because the data says this isn't possible. The driver says, no, don't worry, I can definitely do
five more laps. You trust the driver on those situations very often, but they don't know everything.
I actually don't know of any other sport where the main athlete celebrates the rest of their team as much as they do. In Formula One, you will often hear even Max wist happened that gets a lot of hate. More or less every race, at the end of every race, will say.
What an unbelievable today. That was so enjoyable to drive.
Thank you to the team. That was a great pull, that was phenomenal, strategy, strategy, well executed.
I think up really proud. That was unbelievable.
And he's not the only one. Lewis Hamilton is the same. Charle Leclair carlor signs. They all generally, when they have a really good race, you will hear them say phenomenally well executed, that was the great call. Or when it's bad, they'll say, hey, we need to rewhoop and we talk, you know, and talk about this. This wasn't good. I think it's one of those that we can't. You can build the fastest car in the world if you don't have the right driver. Great you've got a fastest car
that's not going anywhere. You can have the best strategists in the world that can play out the whole thing. But if the race engineer isn't taking the right decision and communicating that to the driver in the right time, and the drivers and executing, then what's the point? And I think it's that connection between all of those pieces that just makes this sports so as big Tag, even the logistical team are Formula one if the car parts
are not arriving on time. Fun fact, all teams can only start unloading all of their cargoes and opening everything once everyone has received their cargo. So if there's a team that's delayed, everyone is delayed, which again I like, it's like you know, and they'll talk about.
It, you forgot to pack the steering wheel. Shit, the whole race.
Is canceled and you will Actually, I know this is not the strategist and this is more the engineers, but the engineers and the mechanics will often talk about the camaraderie amongst the teams. They're like, on the track, we take it all out on the track. We are not friends, we are folks. We are enemies. One of us is winning. Everyone else is not winning. But if you miss a hammer or a screw driver or component, yeah we're going to help you because if we were in that situation.
So there's a camaraderie there amongst the teams, and I think you can see that on the team as well.
Starting to feel like a huge team sport.
Oh my god, that's so perfect. And it is a team sport. And it goes back to the first part of the conversation we had. You have the driver, you have the car, and you have the team. Operationally, all three of those things have to be in harmony. Otherwise, the best driver in the world, with the best car in the world on the worst strategy will not win.
I'll tell you what else isn't going to win a podcast with no funding.
Yes, let's break restponsors and we'll be right back. And we're back.
So this seems obvious, but game strategy is about decisions made during the race.
No, yeah, there's there's there's a whole like, yeah, that's really good because when we talk about strategy, we're talking about stuff in isolation. But you have other strategic considerations. For example, teams are limited by the number of power units or you know the engine and electrical systems together. What if you could find half a second lap of performance, but you had to fit five more engines. And when you fit a certain amount of engines outside of re allocation,
you start taking grid penalties. So there's definitely times in which you're considering that. Even bigger strategies and considering the broader scope of the season is developments. For example, which car upgrades are you going to bring? Where do you want to bring a new car package to a weekend when you only get one practice session, or let's say the first half of the season is all tracks that want a lot of downforce. Are you going to develop a wing for your car that's low downforce in the
first part of the season. Now you're waiting until you need that low downforce wing. You don't need your huge wing until Monaco and that covers you for Singapore. You don't need your super low wing until Spa or Manza, which covers you for the other one of those. But yeah, So understanding the season as a whole, understanding what's important when also influences stuff that's happening at a factory in terms of the design and build of these cars. Rather
than what's happening on the weekend. And that's a whole different strategy and a whole different caniforms.
So not just hey, pitstop and right now. They're also looking at overall everything building the team. It's getting the right driver.
Blah blah blah, everythink that's like a data point they are looking at and bringing in. Teams are always looking to which is what I love, Always looking at the next thing. They're like, cook, or we've got we've got this car, what does next year's car look like? And that's what was interesting by this year is twenty twenty two. There was the biggest overhaul of changes and the car
was fundamentally different than anything that we'd seen before. And some people, some teams were going to you know, come out the door swinging and have a phenomenal teams and phenomenal car, and some teams were going to come out and go, oh, we missed it, like pretty badly. But that's what was exciting about this season in twenty twenty three because everyone was able to go back to the drawing board and go, Okay, cool, we know what works,
we know what doesn't. If something did work, let's focus on that more but it is always like a forward thinking, future thinking sports.
You know, none of this communication can happen if the internet is lousy. Oh yeah, that's is that where that fall under the logistic party.
I see getting the cable set up cables at this at these races are insane. They the cable guys and then mostly men. But the cable teams arrive on the Monday day before like the next day.
They arrive Monday, but they give you a window and they show up between twelve and.
They show up at seven am and they're laying the cables.
I wish cable would logistics is everything?
Okay?
All this determined? Woulds?
I'll be the judgment judge. Yeah, if you think the cable management system we have got going here is is you know.
Tricky and the law you wait, yeah, I do find it interesting to learn about F one strategy. A lot of this is new to me. There's a lot of factors, ins and outs that never would have occurred to me. And I'm realizing now going forward, maybe we could have a new strategy. You just tell me what to do and I'll do it. I'll be a good little George Russell and I'll go pit whenever you want me to.
So we're going back to plan A. Then I'm going to need communication.
I'm going to need a yes, back to plan A non question, non statement.
This has been Choosing Sides f one, a production of Sports Illustrated Studios, iHeart Podcasts and one oh one Studio Podcasts. The show is hosted by Michael Costa and Tony Cowan Brown. This episode was edited, scored, and sound designed by senior producer Jojai may Thaddle. Scott Stone is the executive producer and head of Audio, and Daniel Wexman is Director of Podcast Development and Production Manager at one o one Studios.
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Next week, on Choosing Sides f one, the Data Analyst, we will go into why some Formula one fans like watching the race with not one, not two, not three, but at least five to ten different screens open simultaneously.
Wow yep.
And also why some of the nerdier or shall we say, more tech savvy fans are reverting to writing specific code to actually help them watch and understand and ultimately enjoy the pinnacle of motorsports to its fullest.
What yep, that's that's too much.
We've only got one screen like.
Writing code to enjoy. Okay, we'll get into it, Si Moll