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STRATEGY GUIDE: What are the tactical options for the season opener in Australia?
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After a winter of hard work and industry, F1 returns for 2025 with… the same McLaren front row lock-out it had at the final race of 2024. Behind pole-sitter Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri there were fractions between Max Verstappen, George Russell and the two Ferraris.
But, there is an elephant in the room, and that elephant is wearing a sou’wester and holding a large umbrella. We’re expecting high winds and driving rain at Albert Park on race day, which has the potential to be a game-changer – and that may be why Verstappen, starting third, didn’t look too upset in his post-race interviews. The world champion tends to do rather well with chaos…
What happened last year?
Last year Pirelli rang the changes and brought their three softest compounds to Melbourne. That made the race a solid two-stopper, with everyone taking two sets of the C3 hard compound into the race. Graining, particularly on the front-left tyre, made life quite uncomfortable for most drivers, and the undercut very powerful.
Twelve finishers, including the top seven, all ran a medium>hard>hard race. Winner Carlos Sainz looked after his mediums and went long, to Lap 16; team mate Charles Leclerc went short, pitting on Lap 9 to undercut Lando Norris.
Norris held out the hope that Leclerc would struggle at the end, having made his second stop on Lap 34, six laps before the McLaren man – but last year’s Ferrari was a master at managing front graining, and Leclerc hung on for P2.
Fernando Alonso was the first driver to try something different. He finished sixth but was classified eighth after picking up a penalty. His hard>medium>hard approach successfully moved him up from P10.
Daniel Ricciardo and Zhou Guanyu both tried the soft>hard>hard race, but the soft tyre grained very early, forcing them into pit-stops on Laps 5 and 6 respectively, and neither was able to score.
Race Highlights: 2024 Australian Grand Prix
What should we expect in 2025?
This very much depends on how the weather behaves before and during the Grand Prix. We’re going to outline three scenarios, all of which suggest very different strategy choices…
Option A: The forecast is wrong the bad weather misses Albert Park, and we have a beautiful, sunny late summer day…
We’ve come to Australia a little earlier than we did last year, and the weather so far has been a lot hotter. Pirelli have also evolved their tyres to be a little more robust, with tweaks to the construction and compound.
Put together, it’s produced a tyre that across practice proved much more resistant to graining. According to Mario Isola, Pirelli’s Director of Motorsport, if we have a dry day, this moves the race into one-stop territory.
“With the track in the current condition, and the evolution we had seen since Friday, the data collected shows the new compounds are generating less graining, and the one-stop race, starting on the medium tyre and moving to the hard, is the quickest on paper.”
In this scenario, the fastest way to the flag would be an opening medium stint, running to a window between Laps 20-26, and then a hard tyre to the end of the 58-lap race.
Option B: We have very wet morning – but the rain stops in time for a dry race
This looks a little more likely – particularly were the start to be delayed – as the risk of rain decreases as the afternoon goes on. Under these conditions, with the track washed clean and reset (aka ‘green’), the two-stop race becomes more likely.
“A green track means probably two-stop, because you increase the graining, and you increase the degradation a little bit,” adds Isola.
The teams have mostly hedged their bets and planned for this sort of two-stop, with McLaren, Ferrari, Sauber, Haas, Verstappen and Gasly all keeping two sets of hard tyres. Mercedes, on the other hand, have gone for two Mediums. The optimum two-stop is similar to last year’s winning strategy, a medium>hard>hard race, with a first stop between Laps 13-19, and a second between 33-39.
For the Racing Bulls, Aston Martin, Williams, Liam Lawson and Jack Doohan, who haven’t squirrelled away an extra set of the harder tyres, the soft>medium>hard race is the best two-stop option, with a first stint between six to 12 laps, and a second stop between Laps 26-32.
Option C: Wet race!
This seems like the most feasible scenario, with the forecast currently showing an 80% chance of rain in the lead-up to the race, and a 60% chance at 3pm local time for the start.
While we’ve seen wet laps in Australia, we haven’t had a wet race here since 2010. It’s impossible to predict a strategy, but what we do know is that Pirelli have a new full wet compound this year, likely to present a different sort of race, if the rain is heavy enough to require the blue-banded tyre.
The new wet has been designed with a stiffer tread pattern, the goal of which is to make it less susceptible to overheating than its predecessor in drying conditions. This should give it a bigger overlap with the Intermediate tyre, and thus not compel teams to switch to the inter in the way that has been common in recent years.
This might – might – introduce an extra element of strategy in the wet, rather than having conditions dictate a clear path... but with these tyres never having been used in anger, we’ll have to wait and see.
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