Italian GP: Strategy Summary

The tifosi who came to attend the Italian Grand Prix, on the Monza track for Pirelli’s home race, were treated to a great show, concluding with another victory for Sebastian Vettel. The young German adopted a two-stop strategy to secure an indisputable victory. Starting with the yellow-walled soft compound with which he had achieved pole the day before, Vettel resumed his attack on the track with soft tires after his first stop on the 20th lap. He finally switched to the white-walled medium compound to finish the Grand Prix, with 18 laps remaining. On this occasion, the Red Bull team managed an impressive pit stop in just 2.9 seconds!

The two-stop strategy was the most popular among the drivers. Only Sergio Perez’s Sauber stopped just once, but the Mexican was unable to finish the race due to a technical failure around mid-race.

While Vettel can savor what was a comfortable victory, formidable duels came to enrich the race behind him. One of them pitched Michael Schumacher against Lewis Hamilton for third place throughout half of the race. Both were on soft tires.

In the second half of the Grand Prix, Jenson Button gained momentum on hard tires and overtook Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari, which had led the race at the first corner after a lightning start. The hardest compounds were also used by Lewis Hamilton to set the fastest lap time of the race, at 1’26″187.

Hamilton then set off in pursuit of Alonso, trying to reclaim the third spot on the podium in the final stages of the race. He managed to close the gap to one second in the last lap but faced staunch resistance from Alonso, who secured Ferrari’s 650th podium in history on their home soil. The Ferrari driver will also remember Monza 2011 as the race in which he pushed his points tally above 1000 units.

The Toro Rosso team also had a great race, as both cars finished in the points. Jaime Alguersuari, seventh, and Sébastien Buemi, tenth, both started on soft tires, before switching to another set of softs and finishing the race on mediums.

Thanks to his ninth place, Bruno Senna scored his first points in Formula 1 after qualifying in 10th position and starting the GP on mediums. He was thus able to finish the race offensively with a set of soft tires.

Paul Hembery’s Eye: This first race on the Monza track lived up to all our expectations, and the fact that it was five world champions taking the top five positions highlights the quality of the action! We experienced a very hot Monza weekend, but despite this heat and the sheer energy released by this track, both our soft and medium components performed very well for this extreme test. They did not blister at an unusually high rate for these parameters and showed impressive endurance. As a result, no driver had to slow down, and the action from start to finish was fantastic. We look forward to heading to our first night race in Singapore. We are prepared for the heat and will see the return of the P Zero red supersoft tires.

To get a better understanding of this graph, you can use the FIA lap-by-lap summary by clicking here.