Monaco, Won in the Pit Lane

Monaco still rewards the patient. The race was decided on lap 34, when the leaders committed to a stop two laps earlier than their tyre models recommended, and the pit lane did the rest.

The undercut worked because the out-lap came in clean air: no traffic through Tabac, no lift for a slower car, and a set of mediums already up to temperature before the timing line. That is worth roughly 1.4 seconds here — enough to come out ahead of a car that had been 2.2 seconds up the road.

What the pit wall saw first was not the gap, but the traffic. Three backmarkers were due to enter the tunnel section on the same lap as the leader in-lap, and that made the earlier stop safe rather than risky. It is the least glamorous part of strategy, and it is almost always the decisive one.