Two or three fewer laps per Grand Prix, I wanted to see what that actually meant. I took Baku in the sim, because that’s where Hamilton was preparing his weekend when he criticised the change, and I cut three laps off the end of a reference race.
Result: four minutes and twelve seconds less race, in theory, no safety car, no yellow flag, nobody hesitating into the first braking zone. That’s my delta for the day. Then, in real life, there’s the C3 tyre, which lasts almost the whole race distance, and there, for once, I agree with him: in the sim too, it’s the tyre I pick when I want to run a stint without thinking about it.
One stop is just a variable you change in the strategy menu. In real life the team also has to change the tyres, and my sim doesn’t charge for that the same way.
Hamilton says he’d want longer races, not shorter ones. For me, in the sim, a longer race is just a slider you move. The real debate, I think, is the number of stops, not the number of laps. But they’ll tell me that internally, I’m sure. In theory.
It’s true, we checked: RacingNews365.
