F1 Pit Strategy Simulator

A pit stop strategy calculator built on tyre wear, not a rule of thumb

"Is it a one-stop or a two-stop?" is the question every race broadcast circles and never quite answers with a number. This F1 pit strategy simulator does. Pick a circuit and a driver and it runs every legal plan — each pairing of soft, medium and hard, with the stop laps optimised — and adds up the race time: compound pace, fuel burning off, tyre wear building with every lap, the cliff when a tyre is finished, and the pit lane loss for each stop. The fastest plan is on top and every other one is shown as a delta to it.

It is the same tyre model that runs the race simulator and the season, so what it says about Bahrain or Monaco is exactly what those games will do to you there.

How to use it

• Pick a circuit. Tyre wear, lap count and pit-lane loss all change, and so does the answer: a two-stop that wins at Bahrain loses at Monza.
• Pick a driver. Tyre management is a rating. A driver who is gentle on the tyres can stretch a stint and turn a two-stop circuit into a one-stop.
• Drop a safety car in. Choose a lap and every plan is re-timed with a cheap stop available in that window. Watch the order change.
• Read the undercut. The number of laps a fresh tyre needs to claw back a pit stop against a worn one. Short means the undercut works; long or never means track position is king.

One stop or two: every 2026 circuit, timed

The same calculation for all 24 circuits, with a mid-grid driver of average tyre management, traffic counted, and no safety car. Eighteen of the twenty-four are two-stop races in this model; the six one-stops are the low-wear street and power circuits — Jeddah, Monza, Baku, Las Vegas — plus Melbourne and Monaco, where the second stop is quicker on paper and loses the race in traffic. The gap column is how much the losing plan gives away: 2 seconds at Albert Park is a coin toss the safety car will decide, 35 seconds at Interlagos is not a decision at all.

How to read a strategy call

• Tyre wear sets the number of stops. Where a medium lasts 21 laps (Bahrain, Lusail) a 57-lap race cannot be done on one stop without a hard tyre that is slower every lap than the stop costs. Where it lasts 34 (Las Vegas) the second stop buys nothing.
• Pit loss sets the price. 17.5 seconds at Montreal makes a stop cheap; 22.5 at Shanghai and Bahrain makes every extra stop a real bet.
• Overtaking sets whether pace is spendable. A faster plan that rejoins behind a slower car at Monaco or Hungary never gets to use its pace. That is the traffic column, and it is why the sport's strategists talk about track position before they talk about degradation.
• A safety car re-prices everything. A stop under it costs about 55% of a normal one. Pick a lap on the tool and watch a one-stop circuit turn into a two-stop.

What it leaves out, on purpose

This is clean-air arithmetic. A real strategy also has to survive traffic: rejoining behind a slower car at a circuit where you cannot pass costs real time, which is why a mathematically faster two-stop is often the wrong call at Monaco. The traffic switch adds a per-stop penalty scaled to how hard the circuit is to overtake at, so you can see how much position is worth against pace. Rain, red flags and a rival's strategy are not modelled here — they are what the race sim is for.

Questions

How does the pit strategy simulator decide the fastest plan?

For every legal combination of two or three compounds it tries every possible stop lap, sums the lap times from the tyre-wear and fuel model, adds the pit-lane loss for each stop, and keeps the quickest. Plans are then ranked by total race time and shown as a gap to the best one.

Why is the two-compound rule applied?

Formula 1 requires two different dry compounds in a dry race, so a soft-soft one-stop is never legal. The simulator only offers plans that would not attract a penalty.

What is the undercut window?

The number of laps a car on fresh tyres needs to gain back a full pit stop against a car that stayed out on a set near the cliff. In this model it is about seven laps at Bahrain, Suzuka, Silverstone and Lusail, where the worn tyre is bleeding time, and ten or eleven at Monaco, Monza, Las Vegas and Melbourne, where the old tyre is barely slower than the new one. Short means the undercut works; long means track position is worth more than fresh rubber.

Which F1 circuits are one-stop races?

In this model six of the 24: Jeddah, Monza, Baku and Las Vegas because the tyres barely wear on long straights, and Melbourne and Monaco because a second stop is quicker in clean air but loses the race to traffic. Every other circuit is quicker on two stops, by anything from four seconds at Spa to thirty-five at Interlagos.

What is the difference between an undercut and an overcut?

An undercut is stopping before the car ahead and using fresh tyres to be in front when they stop. An overcut is staying out longer, running in clean air on a tyre that still works, and rejoining ahead. The undercut wins where the fresh tyre is much quicker (high wear); the overcut wins where it is not (low wear) or where the car ahead would rejoin into traffic.

How much does a pit stop cost in F1?

The stop itself is two to three seconds; the loss that matters is the whole pit lane at the limiter against a car at racing speed, which is 17 to 23 seconds depending on the circuit. That figure is in the table above and is what the simulator charges for each stop.

Why does a safety car change the best strategy?

The field slows to a crawl, so a stop that normally costs twenty seconds costs about eleven. A plan with a stop falling inside that window gains almost half a pit stop for free, which is often enough to flip a one-stop into a two-stop.

Are these the real tyre compounds?

They follow the real colour code and the real ordering: soft is quickest and wears fastest, hard is slowest and lasts longest. The wear rates and lap-time offsets are our own model, tuned so the circuits that are two-stop in real life come out two-stop here.

More racing games here

• F1 Simulator Game — run the strategy yourself, lap by lap, from the pit wall.
• F1 Lap Time Simulator — where a single lap goes: car, driver, fuel, tyre, setup.
• F1 Race Predictor — win and podium odds for any Grand Prix.
• One stop or two? Every circuit, timed — the full write-up of the table above.
• Where you can actually overtake — 960 measured races.