rewrite this title Monaco GP: New pit-stop rules analysed by Martin Brundle following Lando Norris victory at street circuit

It’s been a tumultuous eight days for Lando Norris and his world championship chances.

He’s put quite a few demons and F1 paddock doubts to bed with tremendous overtakes in Imola and a sensational pole position in Monaco under extreme pressure from Charles Leclerc, Oscar Piastri, Lewis Hamilton, and Max Verstappen. He followed this up with a largely faultless drive to victory around the streets despite plenty of chaos and challenges.

There are now just three points between him and his McLaren team-mate Piastri as the race marks the completion of the first third of the season. Piastri had what was for him a slightly wild weekend, with a front-wing-crunching connection with the barriers at St Devote in practice, and what he described as hitting the barriers more times in one weekend than his whole career.

But the young Aussie still recorded yet another podium, which, save for one rainy corner in his backyard in Melbourne, means he would have received a trophy at every race this season. And moves his tally to 34 consecutive weekends of points scoring.

Charles Leclerc came into the weekend seemingly certain that his current car had poor performance in slow corners and therefore warned others ‘don’t bet on me’. In fact, he led every practice session, but missed pole position by a fraction and this would confine him to second place in the race, as is so often the story at Monaco.

Like last year, Verstappen’s Red Bull struggled over the kerbs and around the confines of the Principality, relatively speaking, but he still drove the wheels off it as usual.

He would start fourth because Lewis Hamilton unintentionally blocked him in qualifying after receiving misinformation from his engineer, and would painfully take a three-place grid drop down to seventh, which confined Lewis to having to play a team role in the race and a frustrated and lonely fifth place.

‘I was surprised by omission in pit-stop rules’

For decades we’ve known at Monaco that the Saturday qualifying order largely decides the race result, unless there are rain showers and/or untimely safety cars and red flags. That’s how it is, and even 33 years ago in 1992, Nigel Mansell was famously unable to pass Ayrton Senna despite his far superior tyres having suffered a late puncture.

I finished fifth in that race so remember the challenges well. In 1989 I also remember passing a lot of cars in my Brabham, but I had a big tyre advantage having had to pit for two minutes for a new battery situated under my seat, and only then passed cars because I threw total caution to the wind and just attacked everybody to get back to sixth place, and somehow survived all the skirmishes. But back then you could also pass people if they missed a gearshift, and that can’t happen today.

So, let’s not pretend that racing issues in Monaco are confined to this current generation of two-metre wide, and digital rather than analogue, cars. Perhaps 60 years ago spindly cars could overtake, but the race results for many decades back then were dominated by poor reliability and crashes in far less sophisticated cars.

Last year in Monaco there was a red flag for a first-lap heavy accident. All surviving drivers could change their tyres in the pits, thereby complying with the regulation to use two different rubber compounds without track time loss, and then raced until the end without a further pit stop, providing they all went slowly enough. The top 10 on the grid finished in that exact order.

It was decided to try to do something to spice up the racing and with considerable consultation among teams, the FIA, and F1, the solution selected was to have a regulation specific to Monaco which mandated two pits stops and therefore the use of three different sets of dry tyres. And two pit stops even if it rained.

I won’t criticise anybody for trying in good faith to improve the show. However, I was a little surprised that it wasn’t mandated for one of those stops to be taken by, say, half distance, or maybe earlier. It was clear from the outset that some teams at the back of the field may as well cycle through their stops relatively early with nothing much to lose, and those at the front of the field would take their second stop late to make the window of opportunity wider regarding safety cars and red flags.

‘Slow pace not what F1 stands for’

It was also immediately clear that teams could use one car as a sacrificial lamb driving slowly to help their other car have the necessary 21-second gap to take a pit stop.

And that’s pretty much what happened, although the extent to which particularly Racing Bulls and Williams were prepared to slow one of their cars down was quite alarming. But you can’t blame them – they both got both cars into the world championship points after a very solid qualifying performance.

I realised quite early on in the race that all we were really talking about in commentary, after Lando Norris had survived a first corner scare when locking up his front brakes, was just how slowly some drivers were going and endless pit stop debate.

Now of course it’s highly usual for the leader to go slowly and in fact back up all 19 cars in the early stages here, so that nobody has a pit stop window, before gassing it at some point to create their own pitting opportunity.

Instead, we saw selected cars four seconds off the pace with a frustrated queue behind them. Not pretty, or impressive, but effective for some. But hardly what F1 stands for.

Mercedes had a curious strategy with their two cars, marooned in the second half of the field after a qualifying crash from Kimi Antonelli, and a mechanical issue for George Russell. In the race they long appeared to have their heads in the sand about any pit stops at all, Russell pitting on laps 64 and 70, and Antonelli on laps 71 and 73, of 78. They were particularly hindered by the Williams speed yo-yo, and on lap 64 Russell lost patience and steamed through the middle of the seafront chicane, making it very clear on the radio he’d rather take a penalty than yield back behind the Williams roadblock.

Unfortunately for him, he was awarded a drive through penalty which costs 20 seconds, and the FIA had this to say:

“Anticipating that situations such as this might happen at this Monaco Grand Prix, all the teams were informed before the race by the Race Director (at the Stewards request) that the stewards would look carefully at a deliberate leaving of the track at Turn 10 to overtake a car or a train of slow cars. That communication also made it clear that the guideline penalty of 10 seconds may be insufficient for this deliberate infringement and that the penalty applied may be a greater penalty than 10 seconds. We therefore considered that Car 63’s deliberate infringement warranted a drive through penalty and we so imposed.”

Despite the penalty he still finished 11th and so just out of the points.

When we look at the results after all the hype and discussion pre-race about the two-stop rule, pretty much nothing changed. Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari, penalised on the grid, passed Isack Hadjar’s impressively-driven Racing Bull in the pit stop phase. Sadly, Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso had a car failure and retired. Both of those things would have happened anyway.

Along with Racing Bulls’ Hadjar and Liam Lawson in sixth and eighth, and Williams’ Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz in ninth and 10th, another impressive performance was Esteban Ocon who finished an outstanding if under-the-radar seventh in his Haas, without any help from a team-mate road block.

‘The experiment didn’t work’

The two-stop experiment didn’t work. We simply have to manage expectations for race day, do our best to slightly ease overtaking if possible, recognise that Monaco qualifying is one of the most special hours of the F1 or any sporting season, or not race there, which is not an option.

The fact is that the track layout dictates this problem, and available space for creating long straights or wide overtaking zones isn’t available. And even then, very wide tracks still only contain one racing line which is rubbered in. My son Alex had an interesting, if tongue in cheek, solution when suggesting each driver has one joker card to play by steaming through the no-man’s land at the chicane, as George Russell did, and being able to maintain that new position and get off down the road. This would also dissuade all drivers from simply lapping too slowly.

Be in no doubt though, whatever you change in Formula 1 will have unintended consequences, it’s the nature of the beast.

Meanwhile, up front McLaren, Ferrari and one Red Bull serenely powered through all the chaos to run their own races, Lewis Hamilton in fifth being the last unlapped runner 51 seconds behind Norris.

There was a nervy phase for McLaren when Norris caught back up to then leader Verstappen, who was hanging on to his 50-lap-old tyres in the forlorn hope of a red flag, before pitting for the second time on lap 77.

During that time Leclerc’s Ferrari was all over the back of Norris, but he held his nerve and on the final lap, with Verstappen having finally pitted out of his way, he unleashed the fastest lap of the race to underline his rediscovered confidence.

It’s the Spanish GP this coming weekend, an altogether different challenge for teams, cars, and drivers.

F1’s European triple header concludes with the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona, with live coverage starting from Friday on Sky Sports F1. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – no contract, cancel anytime