What was behind F1’s “slower than F2” Monaco GP tactical pace

With overtaking near-impossible in Sunday’s race, and all cars getting their required tyre change in under the opening lap red flag, the only hope for some drivers to put real pressure on the car in front was to hope the required 19-second pitstop gap would open up behind them.

That would allow them to stop again for fresh tyres and either quickly close the gap themselves or hope for a safety car to do the job for them.

The first possibility opened up because Mercedes’ George Russell was very conservative trying to complete the race on medium tyres, leaving a growing gap to the fourth-placed McLaren of Lando Norris.

But Ferrari understood the danger, so it instructed Charles Leclerc to use his unassailable track position on the narrow streets to employ a conservative pace.

That made Leclerc back up Oscar Piastri and Carlos Sainz into Norris, with the gap between Norris and Russell largely kept under that 19-second barrier. In the end, Norris had only one risky opportunity to pit, which McLaren opted not to take.

That tactic actually complicated matters for Leclerc, too, in his bid to grasp that previously elusive first home win.

By being so far off his ultimate pace, and into F2 territory, it was tough for him to find his groove and know where the limits were. It was a pretty big distraction on a circuit where concentration is everything.

“We had a target gap with Russell that we didn’t want to open too much,” Leclerc explained. “I was going so slow in the middle of the race that if you start to push, then you don’t really know where to brake and that’s where mistakes can happen.

“So, I just wanted to get into the rhythm and start to push a bit more. But obviously, the team was telling me: slow down, slow down, slow down.”

Second-placed Piastri was clearly frustrated by the slow lap times, all the way into the 1m20s when in qualifying drivers reached the low 1m10s, that he described as “slower than Formula 2”.

While only the first couple of laps from Leclerc, on high fuel, were actually on F2 pace, it described just how far off the limit the leaders really were. Piastri’s estimated 0.250s worth of damage from contact with Carlos Sainz at the start proved irrelevant.

The tactic was also repeated elsewhere, with RB’s Yuki Tsunoda going extremely slowly to protect against an undercut from…