Stake F1 Aims for Imola to Solve Pit Stop Issues

Stake F1 focuses on refining pit stop strategies at Imola, leveraging lessons from recent tests and races.

Last week at Suzuka, right after the Japanese Grand Prix took place, the Stake F1 team stayed behind to conduct a tire test for Pirelli. As team director Alessandro Alumni Bravi explains, this always provides an opportunity to better understand the car.

“Conducting this Pirelli test was beneficial for the team. It’s not just about working for our tire supplier, but we always have the chance, especially after a race weekend, to perform some checks on the car, to see a correlation. Of course, we can’t change the car’s settings during the day, but from one day to the next, it was important for us to understand certain things.”

“We returned after the weekend with some doubts about, for example, the level of downforce of the rear wing we tested, particularly on the second day when the track conditions were more similar to those of the Grand Prix weekend. For us, this was also an opportunity to practice pit stops, which is currently one of our weaknesses. And we found some additional measures that we can apply as early as this weekend. Overall, the entire team learned a lot, as always, when we go on track.”

Should we expect better pit stops this Sunday in Shanghai?

“Consistency is our goal. We are working hard at Hinwil to resolve these issues, not just for this race and I don’t want to set a date for solving this problem, we try to anticipate and reduce this timeframe. We have other mitigation measures that should allow us to be more consistent. During the last race, unfortunately, we know we lost the opportunity to score points at the second pit stop with Valtteri, because we came out ahead of Tsunoda and rejoined the track behind four drivers, so we know there is a problem. We are working on it and it obviously does not affect our determination to fight for points here.”

“As we’ve said, it’s a hardware issue. We need to review the design of some parts and, of course, when you need to review the design, it takes time for the manufacturing process, especially in some regions. In this case, we are immediately addressing the problem, the issues we’ve revealed, which we found in Bahrain, we are starting to redesign the parts, and now we are in the manufacturing process, and there is a certain delay for these parts that does not depend only on our internal production department. We are trying to reduce this timeframe. Imola is the target, but we want to have something that fixes the problem 100%.”