🇲🇨 F1'25, R08: Los Ingobernables de Monaco

Monaco is the closest thing Formula 1 has to Rainbow Road. Or, to update my cultural references, Monaco is the product of an AI prompt gone haywire. Hey ChatGPT, can you please (always say please to the robots. They’ll remember once they go sentient) draw me a sunset backdrop of Christian Horner on a yacht talking to your man from Greys Anatomy?

It’s also THE Grand Prix that the most casual of casual fans have heard of. It has true cultural cut-through, and despite calls to abandon it, it isn’t going anywhere. Unfortunately, the same description could be applied to the racing on the narrow streets, where there were more celebrities than overtakes, and when you think about it, that’s not a great measure for a Grand Prix.

The usual rules of Formula 1 state that you have to use two different compounds of dry tyres, meaning that you could go round Monaco on a one-stop strategy, and under a red flag, you wouldn’t have to stop at all under conventional means.

This year, they rolled the dice and tried something different, which F1 should be commended for. Drivers had to use at least three different sets of tyres, while keeping the compound rules the same.

Monaco is a strategic race at the best of times, with any drivers best chance of winning coming from qualifying. The second best chance is that your rivals make an error that forces them out of the race, and third is to beat them around the stops, under or overcutting the driver in front.

F1 can’t change the importance of qualifying and they can’t force errors, so they used the only viable move on the board by mandating at least two pit stops.

I thought this was going to lead to some extreme strategies with drivers pitting on lap 1 and lap 2 and then surviving in clear air, making up places when everyone else had to take their pit stops. But that didn’t materialise. I don’t normally get predictions right, but I really didn’t feel bad about getting that one wrong. Even when armed with all the data in the world, Pirelli had no idea what drivers were going to do.

In a sport where everything can be predicted and modelled, I enjoyed the uncertainty that this new move brought in, but in the face of the unknown, the reaction of some F1 teams went back to that underrated strategy: Teamwork.

VCARB showed this best with Liam Lawson acted as rear gunner to protect Isack Hadjar. Knowing he would not be overtaken, Lawson went around four seconds a lap slower than his teammate to buy the French rookie a pit window, doing it twice on both lap 13 and a few laps later on lap 19. Hadjar went on to a career best 6^th , while Liam Lawson scored his first points of the season with an eighth-place finish, also a career best. It was Visa Cash App RB’s first double points finish since Brazil last year.

It was perhaps fitting that Williams were held up the most by VCARB, with team principal James Vowles attempting the sort of zinger only British sarcasm could provide by sardonically calling them Visa Cash App Buy One Get One Free. This time, it was Vowles getting the double discount as neither of his drivers, who were having their own fun discussions, could not get past The Shield of Liam Lawson.

And what of the Mercedes cars. If the extreme strategy of pit early, pit often wasn’t considered, Toto Wolff’s team went for a zero pit stop strategy which worked about as well for them as zero sidepods a few years ago. An utterly frustrated George Russell even cut the chicane to get past Alex Albon, but in the words of The Incredibles, was later caught monologuing. The stewards didn’t give him the expected five-second penalty, but instead told him to drive through the pit lane. Both Mercedes cars eventually finished outside the points as Max Verstappen’s Red Bull claimed 12 points and moved Red Bull to within four points in the race for second in the Teams’ Championship.

So how do we solve the Dashboard Processional that is Monaco? This is May, after all, and there is plenty of competition from the races that Kyle Larson fancies taking on in Indianapolis and later, wherever they did the NASCAR.

Two pit stops was an idea with good intentions, but ultimately turned the race into back up and go. Nothing wrong with that as a strategy, but in a major race (and by the way, F1 should totally have majors) it didn’t work.

There are a few ideas I’ve seen, from abandoning the race altogether, to special one-off cars or tyres. But let’s face it, the race isn’t going anywhere while celebs and yachts turn up in the harbour. The cost cap will put paid to one-off anything. If you’re going to do two pit stops, you need to add a couple of caveats to it.

One should be a rule that you can change tyres during a red flag period, but it doesn’t count towards your total pit stops, so you can’t do what Verstappen did, taking inspiration from Lewis Hamilton in Abu Dhabi 2016 and trying to back the field up so other drivers might overtake or collide, creating a safety car or red flag which would have allowed the two-time Monaco winner to take his first win there since 2023.

Another idea you could consider is pit windows, like we had in Qatar for safety reasons a couple of years ago. This is a bit more abstract but with maximum stint limits, you’d force drivers to pit more.

Some of the drivers apologised for the spectacle, knowing that while the race might look beautiful in the sun, it loses some of the effect when it’s a glorified motorway average speed check on the M4. Therefore, you could enforce minimum lap times that the drivers must stick to, but this becomes a mess of enforcement issues and time penalties all over the place.

Monaco is a stunning, unfixable behemoth of a race weekend. Just like your ex, it had some points, and some bad points, and you could totally fix them if you just had a bit more time. You haven’t. But unlike you, F1 is simply not going to quit the place.

I have my doubts that the 2026 F1 cars are going to make any difference. There’s already talk that F1 will walk back the two stop instructions, and a car that’s a cola bottle shorter and a chocolate bar narrower is not the thing that moves the needle.

Here’s a patronising Q&A that won’t make you feel better about it.

It’s a stereotypical home for a Bond villain and a circuit that acts like one too. Ungovernable, unignorable, unmissable. A love letter to decadence with surroundings that look like Aaron Taylor-Johnson (shhhh) is about to ask for a Martini. Yet, despite the sparkle, the drivers weren’t shaken and the F1 crowd weren’t stirred. You might dislike it, but you can’t wait to see it again next year, even if you know Saturday is the day to really watch.

F1 moves on to Spain this weekend for the final header and potentially the last visit to Circuit de Catalunya. The Barcelona circuit has a contract until 2026, but with the Madrid street circuit joining the global circus, this might be a clasico that the Spanish capital wins early. I liked Barcelona, and yes, dammit, I also liked the chicane at the end of the lap. Free practice has already seen both McLarens on top at the circuit where Max Verstappen claimed his first F1 win, in part due to Hamilton and Rosberg crashing their dominant cars on the opening lap.

It couldn’t happen again… could it?