Grid positions 9, 10, 11, 12 and Strategy

[gcdugas]

Might it be better to qualify 11th than 10th? You are only one position behind and have more fuel strategy options. Your car has just that much less wear and tear on it also. And if we accept that 11th might be advantageous over 10th, might it also be better than 9th? Would 12th be better than 10th (also starting on the clean line!)? Etc. You can see where this is going. There are too few races this year to do a statistical analysis of the results and draw any meaningful conclusions. DNFs due to crashes mix things up. A late DNF due to reliability issues could be attributed to the extra running but most DNFs so far have been incidents and early blow-ups.

I had thought of this last year and wondered. But what really got me thinking was Timo Glock's comments about Monaco today. 11th also allows the driver greater flexibility to respond to possible rain strategies as well.

Overall I speculate that 11th is better than even 9th from a race engineer's view and also from a results view (once the statistical sample gets large enough).

[Mr Alcatraz]

In many situations it is, arguably! At Monaco with the tires they have, it would depend on the car. A one-stop strategy in my opinion is a little dodgy for most cars in this race. This is to say nothing of the reasons for not going long fuel if there are changing weather/track conditions! But that's a different question!

[Miguel]

It's an often made point. I think everybody is interested on this, so I've had a look at raw results (not taking safety cars, penalties, retirements or anything else into account). The following is the number of times grid pos x has beat the others since 2006. I've considered 9, 10, 11 and 12 starting positions:

9: 10 (4 - 4 - 2)
10: 10 (5 - 5 - 0)
11: 12 (5 - 5 - 2)
12: 7 (3 - 3 - 1)

I didn't count the 2006 US GP, because all four were taken out in the first corner incident. Note that at least two of the 10th place "wins" correspond to not taking part into Q3 (Schumi in Brazil 06, Alonso in France 07). The total results are then split into a per-year basis.

My conlcusions from these numbers are:

• Start from pole! In any case, avoid 12th like the plague.
• Incidents and penalties add randomness to the other three positions, so it doesn't make much difference.
• The slow Q3 cars are indeed fueled taking 11th and 12th strategies into account.

I know beating the others is a bit of an oversimplification but, the truth is, we don't have enough sampling to split the results into all the possible classifications. Furthermore, I believe first lap incidents are more likely in these positions, adding more randomness. It could be interesting to see which position gets points more often (my bet is 9th) and the definitive 10th vs 11th showdown. I might do an edit later just for this.

EDIT: Taking the place of Ciro, I'll also count the points gotten by all four positions since 2006, and count the 10th vs 11th showdown:

Points:
9 - 36 pt (16+12+8)
10 - 39 pt (23+16+0)
11 - 46 pt (17+21+8)
12 - 26 pt (8+16+2)

10th vs 11th: 21/18 or 53.8% vs 46.2%

Amazingly, all four got big points in Fuji last year. Another conclusion: if you are in the midfield, it'd better rain (i.e. nothing we didn't expect). It is curious that starting 11th you have your odds against 10th, but then you score more points!. I personally feel that the points score is distorted because only the first eight drivers get something.

DISCLAIMER: I'm performing the complex task of summing, so the accuracy of all these numbers is highly dubious.