The free tyre change under a red flag rewards luck

A rule allowing work on stopped cars turns an unpredictable stoppage into the single largest strategic swing available in a race.

When a race is stopped, teams may work on the cars. That includes fitting new tyres, and it costs nothing, because everybody is stationary and the field is held in order. It is a sensible provision. Cars need checking after whatever caused the stoppage, and forcing a pit stop after the restart would penalise drivers for an incident they had nothing to do with.

The consequence is that the biggest strategic event in a modern race is often a crash somebody else had.

Consider two cars a lap from the flag order. One has stopped, given up twenty seconds in the pit lane and rejoined behind. The other has stayed out on old rubber, holding position, hoping. A red flag arrives. The car that stayed out receives, for free, the thing the other car paid twenty seconds for, plus a compressed field and a standing restart. Every strategic decision taken in the previous hour has been erased by an event nobody could forecast.

I do not think that is a scandal either. Racing has always contained luck. But there is a difference between luck that scatters outcomes and a rule that concentrates the entire value of a race into one random moment, and the free tyre change does the second thing.

It also creates an incentive that officials should be uncomfortable with. If a driver at the back of the field knows a stoppage would transform their afternoon, and knows that a car stopped in an awkward place is one of the reliable ways to produce one, the rule has placed a small, ugly weight on the wrong side of a decision that ought to be simple. I am not alleging anyone does it. I am saying the rule should not be structured so that anyone would benefit.

The counter-argument is safety, and it is a good one. A car that has been sitting cold with damaged bodywork should be inspected, and refusing tyres would push teams to hide problems.

Fine. Allow the work, allow the inspection, but require the car to serve whatever pit stop obligation it had not yet met after the restart. The safety purpose survives. The windfall does not.

Until that changes, half the pit wall spends every race quietly hoping for something bad to happen to somebody else.