The safety car that gave Sergio Perez the advantage on 2023 Azerbaijan Grand Prix
A safety car in the Baku came at exactly the wrong time for Max Verstappen. Mark Hughes explains how the stoppage played into his team-mate’s hands
Nyck de Vries’ AlphaTauri is out of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix but race control delayed the safety car.
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Strategically, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix followed a very similar pattern to that of the previous race in Australia in that an early safety car within a one-stop race made for conflicted decisions upon the various team pitwalls. It had a profound effect on the way the race in Baku played out between the two Red Bull drivers at the head of the field, but maybe not the outcome.
The crucial safety car this time was for Nyck de Vries’ AlphaTauri. He had glanced the Turn 6 wall with his front-left wheel on the 10th lap. It immediately broke the suspension’s track rod and with no way of steering around the following right-hander, he pulled onto the run-off area between the two corners. All that the teams and race control could see on the TV screens was the car on the run-off area with its engine still running. Without knowing the car had no way of steering, it seemed feasible that de Vries would simply reverse back onto the track and rejoin.
Max Verstappen was called into the pit
With the field having passed the incident, there was no hurry for race control to make a decision on whether the safety car was needed and it waited to see what de Vries was going to do. The incident had happened as Max Verstappen and the closely following Sergio Pérez were up at Turn 13-14 and they were still racing hard. Pérez, in fact, had got himself to within DRS range of Verstappen as they entered the long kinking ‘straight’ and looked certain to try for the pass. As this was happening, the Red Bull pitwall was still trying to second-guess what race control might be doing about de Vries. A pitstop under a safety car would be 10sec less costly relative to the field than one with the pack at full racing speed. But the safety car still hadn’t been called as Verstappen was racing towards the point of no return to the pit entry road (something which had caught out Pérez under a similar situation last year). Red Bull made the call for him to pit. In he came. But still no safety car.
“Pitting Max when they did got Red Bull out of an awkward situation”
Had Red Bull not pitted Verstappen at this moment and Pérez had succeeded in putting a DRS-assisted overtake on him (which looked highly feasible), Pérez would have assumed pitstop priority as the leading car (likely putting the team in an awkward situation). Without a safety car, that would have made Verstappen’s stop at least two laps later than the one he made, increasing Pérez’s advantage over him. Pitting Verstappen when they did got the team out of that awkward situation. But at the ‘risk’ (for Verstappen’s chances) of the safety car being called on Max’s out-lap (thereby allowing Pérez to pit under the safety car and thus leapfrogging past Verstappen). That is exactly what happened. Verstappen was up at Turn 2 on his out-lap when the safety car was called, allowing the now race-leading Pérez to pit without losing position.
Once racing was underway again Verstappen threw all that he had at his team-mate and had he been able to get to one of the DRS detection points less than 1sec behind, he’d likely have been able to nail a pass on him. But Pérez’s pace never allowed Verstappen to do that. He came within 0.1sec of it on one lap, but thereafter Pérez responded and Max never got so close again.
“You were unlucky with the safety car,” said Pérez to Verstappen in the green room. “Well, it happens,” retorted Max. “It happened to you last year in Jeddah.” Indeed it had.