It’s been labelled as insane. It’s been mocked for looking ridiculous. One Formula 1 driver said it is like fighting for your life. And it has opened the door for teams to play tricks up and down the pitlane to fool their rivals.
Welcome to the world of F1 2025’s pitlane games, where getting the right place in the queue for qualifying has become a big under-the-radar battle.
Success and failure for teams and drivers rests on picking the perfect spot in the traffic jam of cars that leave the pitlane for every qualifying run.
Go too early and there are consequences. You lose out on the perfect track conditions when most rubber is down, plus there is a danger of hitting traffic on your quick lap and that can ruin everything.
But go too late and you risk getting squeezed out of the queue.
And the difference between these two extremes can be down to less than one second in leaving the garage.
Being last to set a lap may be good for having the most rubber down on the track, but sitting at the back of the pitlane queue means you are exposed to getting timed out – and maybe not getting a lap in at all.
The biggest downside though is, if you are last, you end up sitting stationary stuck in traffic at the end of the pitlane for more than a minute – as cars wait at the exit to leave gaps to those ahead.
All that time, your tyres are losing temperature, so your qualifying preparation plans are thrown out of the window, and your lap gets ruined anyway.
It’s no wonder that some drivers are singling out these crucial seconds as a key stress point of a weekend.
Haas driver Esteban Ocon called it “extremely difficult and stressful for the team” and said the mechanics are “fighting like crazy” as they second-guess what their rivals are doing.
This is why teams are having to prepare meticulously to try to find the sweet spot position that is somewhere near the front of the pack.
But it is also why some of them are unleashing games on their rivals to trick them into jumping early or going too late.
Here we explain what’s opened up this new battleground, and detail the tricks teams are using to fool their rivals.
The trigger point
With the competitiveness of the field having compressed this year in the midfield in particular, and with overtaking so hard, grid positions have become even more critical to dictating whether weekends are average or sensational in the tightest part of the F1 pack.
So that means more emphasis than ever is on executing qualifying as well as possible, which means getting every detail of car preparation right.
Key to this is getting tyres into the right operating window for qualifying and being on track at the right time.
In the past, the best place was almost always as the last car across the line, in order to get the best track conditions.
But picking your spot on track these days has been made much harder by rules that were introduced in 2023 to prevent drivers from trying to engineer being at the back of the train by going slowly on their out-laps.
Dawdling in the final corners was posing some dangers, and many near misses – as cars on hot laps encountered a pack of cars idling to find clear space. So it showed that something needed to be done before there was a big crash.
The chaos reached its peak at the 2019 Italian Grand Prix when drivers ended up driving ridiculously slowly, to make sure they were not at the head of a queue and left without a slipstream.
There was also the bizarre scenario of Nico Hulkenberg’s Renault, the first car out of the pits, accidentally running down an escape road to lose time and drop into the pack. It didn't work as others backed off more, so Hulkenberg could not benefit.
And in the end, the pack of cars went so leisurely that seven of the nine on track failed to get across the line in time…
It was the snowball effect from that madness that eventually opened the door for changes from the 2022 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, when then-F1 race director Niels Wittich introduced a maximum delta time (so minimum speed) for outlaps.
This followed from already-in-place protocols that meant drivers could not go too slowly on their in-laps.
From then on, drivers were forced to get their gaps before they got on track in the pitlane – which initially did not create too many problems.
However, some close calls as drivers started being aggressive in overtaking in wider pitlanes, as well as the odd crunched front wing, opened the door for some further restrictions to be laid down in terms of pitlane etiquette.
At the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix, Wittich introduced some revised rules in his event notes that laid out some new accepted behaviours.
As well as clarifying requirements from the International Sporting Code (ISC) that drivers had to blend into the fast lane of the pits as soon as they could, a new stance was imposed about getting position in the queue.
It stated – and this is something that has stayed in place ever since – that a car “will be considered to be in the fast lane” when a tyre has crossed the solid white line separating the fast lane from the inner lane.
It was clarified that this meant that all of a tyre should be beyond the far side of the line.
To stop drivers being cheeky and nudging their front tyre across the line to push in, the notes made clear that the ISC demands they can only move there: “without unnecessarily impeding cars which are already in the fast lane.”
That effectively meant that drivers coming out of their garages had to wait for gaps in the train – and also meant those already heading down to the pit exit did not have to give way to anyone waiting.
This combination of protocols has opened the door to situations where, if a driver is marginally too late leaving their garage, then they do not just lose a place to one or two cars – they can go from being near the front of the queue (where the delay leaving the pits is minimal) to right at the back.
And that is a nightmare to face with 20 drivers in Q1. Because, with no overtaking allowed in the fast lane, plus every car at the exit waiting around five seconds before going out, you can be trapped for 1m40s at the back of the train.
Pirelli reckons this can reduce your tyre temperatures from around 115 degrees Centigrade to 80 degrees.
Beyond the problems triggered by bleeding tyre temperature if you are forced to wait too long, it also comes with the risk of you getting timed out completely and failing to be able to make it around before the end of the session if everyone has left it late.
Or, if you do get out in time, you can find your out lap is interrupted by other cars coming past you on hot laps – so you have to slow down, which further wrecks tyre preparation.
It’s no surprise that Carlos Sainz says, “you’re fighting for your life” even before you’ve left the pitlane in F1 qualifying nowadays.
Divided opinion
The imposition of the pitlane rules – and the games they have triggered – has divided opinion in the paddock.
The sometimes chaotic scenes as teams try to jostle for their place in the queue, and the extra stress it brings along, are viewed by some as a failure of the regulations.
Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu believes it’s the result of a “completely unnecessary” maximum delta time rule.
He thinks it’s a byproduct of a “not-thought-through band-aid regulation”.
But others accept that while the pitlane rules have created headaches, they are only there to prevent a much bigger problem – which was the risk of crashes in final corners because of the huge closing speeds between those drivers on push laps and those going slowly to create a gap.
"We're very supportive of it as well because what it has taken away is all the danger on the track of cars approaching each other at different speeds," Aston Martin sporting director Andy Stevenson said.
But he also pointed to “the game of chess” that it has created.
The tricks at play
The gains that can come from getting the perfect spot in the pitlane queue – as well as the losses your rivals can experience if they are in the wrong place – are why teams have unleashed some warfare tactics to boost their chances of getting it right.
How urgently teams need to get on the front foot for queue placement depends where they end up in pitlane order – which is based on the previous year’s constructors’ championship.
Those at the bottom end of the pitlane nearest the pit exit have a mixed blessing of the easiest route to get out unhindered, but equally the biggest danger of missing their slot if they don’t want to run first.
It only takes a few cars to go a bit early, and fill up the fast lane while waiting, for these teams’ exit routes to be blocked entirely – leaving them exposed to sitting there while the rest of the pack all sail past.
That is because drivers coming down the pitlane know that it is not in their interests to be polite to their rivals – so they can be pretty robust in not leaving any gaps for anyone to slot in.
It’s perhaps then no surprise that this has led to scenarios like Nico Hulkenberg and Lance Stroll’s bizarre clash in the pitlane in qualifying at the Belgian GP.
Hulkenberg broke his front wing but the stewards handed Sauber a reprimand for sending Hulkenberg into Stroll’s path.
Hulkenberg had no tyre over the line of the fast lane and therefore Stroll had priority. The stewards said Hulkenberg should have waited for a “suitable gap” and merged when one existed.
On the flip side to some teams being over eager, some drivers know that a bit of a delay leaving the pits can help them in keeping tyres cool if their car likes that – so letting people in is not a problem.
That is especially true if it delays rivals behind them who do not like waiting.
Every single car has different characteristics and they all require very different outlaps to get their tyres into the optimal window.
Alex Albon said some teams purposely let cars get in front of them, because for them it's better to cool the tyres down before they start their out-laps.
At tracks like Zandvoort the Williams’s average outlaps are around 10-15s quicker than those cars around them, so when his outlap at Zandvoort was 25s slower than usual, he had no tyre temperature and tumbled out of Q2 in 15th.
Teams too are getting involved in psychological games up and down the pitlane to try to trick rivals into blinking first.
Mechanics are being dispatched up and down the pitlane to pay attention to what the opposition are doing – and give a bit of pre-warning about when it seems others are making a move to get their cars out of the garage.
But this has triggered a bit of a counter offensive approach, in that some are doing dummy moves to trick others into thinking they are about to go.
Asked by The Race if teams were playing games with each other, Stevenson said: “Absolutely! And we're all getting used to those games.
He said the teams have software on the pitwall and they can see when engines or cars are turned on and off.
"You see cars popping on, off, on, off, and mechanics running in and out," he explained.
"But we have a plan that we stick to, so we try not to be fooled by what anybody else is doing.”
The pitlane games are going to remain a part of grand prix racing until at least the end of this year.
But how big a factor they become in 2026 will very much depend on tyre sensitivities, overtaking chances and the closeness of the grid.
There is another interesting element to next year though. And that is that with Cadillac arriving, if the games are still a part of F1, then there are going to be two extra cars joining in on the tactical chaos.
The post The hidden F1 war that's become an 'insane' battleground appeared first on Formula 1 – The Race.