Monaco Race-Pace: Tense VER-ALO Battle i ...

Monaco Race-Pace: Tense VER-ALO Battle in the Dry and Wet!

May 29, 2023

Monaco GP started as a somewhat uneventful (yet tense) race and turned out to be an absolute thriller after the first raindrops! The race-pace analysis will therefore be split into two parts: before and after the rain hit.

Before the rain, the 'processional' nature of the race is evident: SAI had to match OCO's laptimes, and so did LEC relative to HAM and others along the grid. Even though never close enough to attack, ALO almost matched Verstappen's laptimes in the dry: he was slower up to lap 25, but then VER reached the traffic and was slowed down significantly. The fact that OCO could stay just 0.41s/lap off VER's pace is something the team should be proud of, and Gasly's pace was also excellent. PER had very high laptime variance in the dry: he had the pace to produce excellent laps, but he was stuck in traffic for most of the laps (you can notice that from the evolution of his laptimes as well). The best of the rest were TSU and the two McLarens.

Then, around lap 47, laptimes started to be affected by sudden rain. Laptimes grew from 1.18 on average to 1.40 in just 7-8 laps. The drivers on fresh mediums (SAI, LEC) were the fastest in this phase, thanks to the grip provided by softer compounds in very cold and rainy conditions. Instead, some drivers on old Hards (like MAG) were driving on ice and had to pose extra attention in the wet sector 2 to maintain control, losing a lot of time. In these last 23 laps, despite the extreme weather conditions and critical grip levels, just 2 hundredths of a second separated VER and ALO: that's less than half a second over that distance!

The Ferraris were slightly faster than the Mercedes, as was also the case in the dry: it was strategy that killed their race, not performance. Although not as competitive as in the dry, OCO was still the 6th fastest and slightly faster than RUS.

The two McLarens somehow came to life in the rainy part of the race: they were 8th and 9th fastest, one position better than their final results (9th and 10th). They kept the intermediate tyres in the correct operating window, especially as the track started to dry: they were fastest in this section, as the smoothed laptime evolution shows! Two clear losers emerge from this race: Perez, who was a victim of a sub-par strategy but also touched the wall getting a puncture, forcing him to pit again; and Stroll, who did not have the pace all the weekend and had to retire after an eventful first stint.

I hope this analysis gave you a clearer picture of the race and the two halves of it! Monaco is an outlier, and as such, it's always interesting in terms of results and data. Significant updates are expected in Spain for Ferrari and a few other teams: let's see their impact on the current running order. Thank you all: I devote all this time to this page with great pleasure, knowing that many people understand F1 on a deeper level thanks to it!

Mirco/FormulaDataAnalysis

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