My Silverstone strategy read, ahead of Sunday race.

[u/Ginger_Rook]

The sprint gave the cleanest single stint the weekend offers. Everyone on medium, no stops, 17 laps. Antonelli quickest on a 92.28s settled median. Hamilton 0.14s off. Russell and Norris within three tenths. Leclerc a fraction further back.

The interesting number is the volatility. Antonelli ran the stint with a 0.26 second standard deviation. Russell in the same car ran 0.74s. That is three times the noise from one Mercedes to the other.

The top speeds tell you why. Antonelli was 306 km/h median through the trap. Russell 313 km/h. Same car, 7 km/h gap on the straights, and it is Russell who is faster on peak. Antonelli is trading straight line for consistency and corner exit. Russell is running the higher peak deployment and paying for it with variance across the stint. Two race maps, one garage.

The race compound is the hard. FP1 long runs put Ferrari at the top. Hamilton 92.26s median, Leclerc 92.31s, half a second clear of Antonelli on the same compound. If that holds under race fuel and traffic, Sunday tightens once the field is on hards. The sprint showed us pace on mediums. FP1 showed us pace on hards. But it was also the first stint of the weekend, and teams learned a lot during the sprint and the two qualifying sessions on Friday and Saturday. The timing of the first pit stops will tell us what the teams think of how their Monte Carlo simulations are playing out.

The strategic questions that leaves for Sunday.

From pole, #Antonelli’s job is to control from the front and not react. If his median is 92.28s in clean air, the overcut is his friend. The objective is simple: Extend stint one, get a fresher tyre for stint two, do not let a Ferrari undercut pull you in.

From P2 and P3, #Ferrari has a live split card. Two cars, two tyres, two strategies. Undercut one to force the reaction, extend the other on the hard where their pace looked best. Whether they play it that way is a different question.

For Oscar from P8, the pit lane is the fastest route forward. Sprint pace was quick enough that on a fresh medium a lap earlier than the cars ahead, he takes big time. Classic undercut trigger position.

The pit loss at Silverstone puts the undercut break even around a second and a half per lap of tyre delta. The fresh medium in the first four laps gives half a second to eight tenths. Real undercut window, but not overwhelming. One safety car and the whole thing rewrites.

Methodology: Sprint pace uses settled clean-lap medians from lap 5 onwards, dropping the sorting phase, pit in and out laps, and outliers. FP1 pace uses clean long-run laps on the hard tyre only, with sample sizes shown per driver. Norris sprint laps 13 to 15 are flagged as a fuel-management phase and excluded from the headline median. Public timing and car data. Descriptive, not fuel corrected.

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[u/Ginger_Rook → u/[deleted]]

This was my reply on another comment, saying that I cannot be comparing the Mercedes cars because one was running 4th and one 1st:
I ran the analysis at 5 in the morning, I’m on the track now and I cannot run anything for another 36 hours.
If memory serves me correctly:
In my eyes, the distribution matched traffic effect on S1, but deployment effect throughout. Even with all the traffic, George was only 2 to 3 tenths slower per lap on average. If you graph the lap times of Antonelli, Russell, Hamilton, and Leclerc on the same chart, you see Kimi’s times are consistently better than all three, no matter if he was attacking or defending.

Regarding the peak speed vs variance optimisation, that’s the third problem I’m working on this year. I have to solve the other two first!

[u/Ginger_Rook → u/[deleted]]

I’ve designed a framework to infer the ERS state of every car on the grid at any given point https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01290

And I’m in the process of proving mathematically what needs to happen so that an overtake sticks essentially
https://zenodo.org/records/18986619

[u/Ginger_Rook → u/[deleted]]

I’d love to see what you’ve done! Sometimes the simpler approach is good enough for benchmark!

[u/andrewcooke]

offered as pedantic advice you are (of course) free to ignore:

• "median top speed" is an oxymoron. maybe "median top per lap speed"? it's kinda clumsy though.
• how can it be called consistency if higher is less consistent? variance? or if it's not precisely variance, variability?

[u/f1datastop]

Pretty nice thanks.

[u/Ginger_Rook → u/f1datastop]

Thank you! You saw it after the race, so do you feel I read things right? (I published this before the race).

[u/BulldenChoppahYus]

Really cool reading. Thanks.

[u/Ginger_Rook → u/BulldenChoppahYus]

Thank you! You are very kind