We drill the qualifying lap and ignore the lap that decides the race

Sim programmes are built almost entirely around single fast laps, while the messy laps around a pit stop get almost no rehearsal.

Ten thousand qualifying simulations. That is roughly what a junior driver accumulates before he ever races something serious, because a fast lap is easy to set up, easy to measure, and immediately satisfying. Push lap, delta on the screen, try again.

An undercut is decided by two laps that look nothing like that. The in lap, driven on tyres that are finished, where the job is to keep enough temperature in the brakes while giving away as little as possible and hitting a pit entry the driver has approached at that speed maybe twice. Then the out lap, on cold rubber, where the useful skill is knowing precisely how much grip is actually available in sector one rather than how much you would like there to be. Get either wrong by four tenths and the strategy the whole race was built around does not work.

Neither of them gets practised properly, because they are unpleasant to practise. There is no clean lap time to compare against. Success is invisible.

I would build the entire junior sim week around them. Cold tyre exercises where the driver has to hit a target time on the out lap, not the fastest possible time, which teaches restraint and calibration together. In laps run at the end of long stints with the engineer calling a change of plan halfway down the back straight, so that reacting to a call becomes ordinary rather than startling. Pit entry practice in the wet. Boring, specific, and directly connected to results.

The pushback is that seat time is expensive and qualifying pace is what gets a driver hired, which is true and is the whole reason the imbalance persists. A junior who is two tenths quicker over one lap gets the seat. Nobody looks at his out laps.

That preference then follows him upward, and you end up with professional drivers who are exceptional at the thing they rehearsed and merely adequate at the thing that decides Sundays.

Strategy gets blamed for a lot of races that were actually lost by a cold front left.