F1 2025 - Round 8 - Monaco - Monaco 🇲🇨

Red Bull really fecked up with Maxs strategy. He could of been on the podium had he pitted sooner. I get they were hoping for a safety car but it cost them points.

Didn't know Max played golf. You learn something new every day.

I know I'm going against the grain here but I sort of enjoyed the race. You don't go into Monaco expecting overtakes so it's more about strategy and undercuts etc. George and Kimi not pitting for so long kept me going, every lap I kept thinking surely they must go in??

Gutted for Alonso. What does the guy have to do?? Here's hoping Newey designs a rocket for 2026 and he has one last chance of a title.

McLaren's title(s) to lose this year. And Hamilton not gonna stick around for long with that Ferrari I think.

The mandated 2 stop was the last shred of hope people had to make Monaco a somewhat decent race and it didn’t deliver, will it ever be cut? No so I guess we will just have to make do, but needing a crash and safety car/red flag to shake things up is a grim outlook for the race. To be fair it’s probably the best qualifying session for the season so atleast it has that.

Lol 😂 . You know what I meant.

Course i did. Couldn't resist. 🤣

How did Russell end P11? Wasnt him and Antonelli running around P11/P12 behind each other and behind Albon before they took their mandated 2 pitstops. Then somehow he still ends P11 even with taking a drive through penalty and 2 pit stops, but Antonelli only managed P18 soon as he took his 2 pitstops.

I enjoyed it too, but then I enjoy Monaco pretty much every year. Last year was a massive anomaly due to the red flag and they overcorrected for that with the forced 2 stops which I think was a mistake. Maybe a simple "no tyre changes allowed during red flag at Monaco" would have been a better solution.

The problem with the forced two stops is that the teams effectively had way more tyre life than they needed for the stops they were making, so when stops happened there was no tyre offset. There was no undercut or overcut, a car that had just stopped basically had the same pace as a car that was about to stop. There were moments when The McLarens, Leclerc and Verstappen were running close together and then pitted on different laps, yet nobody was able to push on and make a difference during that offset. It also caused the midfield to spend most of the race lapping ridiculously slowly reducing any risk of mistakes that might have thrown in a safety car or more drama. In a normal 1 stop race Lawson couldn't have really done what he did because the other cars behind would have just pit and undercut him.

So the experiment failed in my opinion. I suspect it would have been a better race with one stop. It was still a good event though, there was lots of jeapordy, I was on the edge of my seat at the end wondering if Leclerc was going to make a lunge on Norris. There were points when Lando made mistakes and it could have happened. We also saw Oscar touching the barriers where a few millimeters of difference could have completely changed the race. And for all the games in the midfield, the top 4 genuinely pushed for much of the race, as evidenced by the extent to which they left Hamilton for dust.

But I just want them to stop trying to "fix" Monaco with silly rules. I've followed F1 for close to 40 years at this stage and it's thrown up so many incredibly memorable races and moments. Honestly there's very little better than watching the on board of a qualifying lap around Monaco, and I appreciate strategy so I don't rate GPs by quantity of overtakes. Especially when there are so many tracks on the calendar, they don't all need to be the same and there's room for the unique challenges Monaco provides.

Last year was a complete anomaly due to the red flag like I mentioned, but even the previous three or four years prior to that threw up multiple great moments and races. And go back further and it gets better, because what really needs to be fixed is these massive cars and overly durable tyres, which are a problem at almost every track.

But Mercs left it too later to be able to swap their cars and allow Russell back up everyone for Antonelli.

I was listening to The Race earlier and they said it was the Mercs plan to do the same strategy if they had of qualified together higher up the grid. At the end it felt like they didn't know what to do from a strategy point of view.

I agree, we can't go back to the small cars. So if we can't make a circuit suit the newer cars, maybe it's time to reflect on whether that circuit belongs in F1 any more…

Yes they can. Most of the increase in size over the last couple of decades is not due to safety.

2017 was the year they got significantly bigger. The reason for this was that the hybrid engines introduced in 2014 were embarrassingly slow due to the extra weight. Around Monaco the GP2 cars were faster. To bring speeds back up to F1 standards they brought in a new suite of rules in 2016 that involved bigger wider tyres and bigger cars with more aero surfaces that allowed them to compensate for the extra weight with more grip.

Where safety came in was that we now had these much bigger, much grippier, much heavier cars due to the hybrids and the aero regulations to compensate for them. This meant the forces were massively increased in the event of an accident, which needed safety measures to be bulked up.

If you go back to smaller, lighter V10 engines then everything else can get smaller without sacrificing safety. Yes, we're never going to get back to a bath on wheels like the 1960s, but you don't need to go very far back, just look at the early 2000s to see much smaller cars that had pretty similar safety standards to today, standards that could be increased without making them bigger.

0.2m is not insignificant, and that doesn't account for the much wider front wings today either. In the early 2000s the front wing was a maximum of 140cm which is tiny compared to today's cars. That made it much less risky to stick a nose in and try to claim a corner without losing your wing, in which case space would be made for the rest of the car if you were far enough alongside.

What that graph really shows though is the massive increase of nearly 2 additional meters in length which makes a monumental difference in the possibility to overtake. Take two sofas that are the same width but one is 2 meters longer than the other and see how easily they can get around a corner in a staircase. It's an oversimplification to think only width makes a difference in how much space a car needs to squeeze through in a corner. And even at the most basic level it's almost a 50% difference in the amount of distance you need to gain in a braking zone to make up a car length and get alongside someone.

It's about 1.5 meters since the early 2000s. It's entirely feasible to shorten them to 4.5 meters or a bit less from the current size that is getting close to 6 meters. And it wouldn't be for one track, it would improve the racing on all tracks.