Formula 1's own race-day round-ups have now used the word "pivotal" about a Virtual Safety Car twice in seven days, and both times the car that triggered it was Lance Stroll's Aston Martin. At Monza on 6 September, the report records that "the Canadian's DNF did cause a pivotal Virtual Safety Car". At the Madring on 13 September, Stroll "caused the pivotal Virtual Safety Car when he parked up in the run off area with a car problem". Kimi Antonelli won both races.
The tempting reading is that one driver's unreliability handed the same man two victories by the same route. That reading does not survive the two race reports, and what replaces it is more useful.
Monza gave a tyre offset. Madrid gave track position.
At Monza the neutralisation cost Antonelli places before it gained him anything. He pitted under it and rejoined sixth, behind a George Russell who stayed out and kept the lead. What the stop bought was fresher rubber than his team mate's, and Antonelli still had to convert it himself, which he did on lap 50 with a pass that stuck between Lesmo 2 and the Ascari chicane.
Antonelli's own account of the Madring skips the conversion step, because there was none to make: "we were able to dive into the pits just as the Virtual Safety Car was deployed, make the cheap stop onto the Hard, get the net lead and run to the end." No overtake appears in that sentence because none was required. He emerged in front and stayed there, and the classification has him winning by 4.351s from Max Verstappen.
The variable was how long the recovery took
Monza's window stayed open across more than one lap. Nico Hulkenberg, Esteban Ocon and Carlos Sainz pitted immediately, and Antonelli and Verstappen took the same opportunity a lap later. Every driver who wanted the cheap stop got a chance at it, and the ones who declined it, Russell among them, made a choice.
Madrid's window did not stay open. Formula 1's account of why is a single clause about geography: Stroll "made it to a gap in the barriers, so the marshals were able to push his car out the way quickly". Stroll's own account explains why the car was there to be pushed: damage picked up in the opening laps, then brake trouble with the pedal "getting very long", a lock-up, and an attempt to spin the car round in the run-off that failed because "I didn't have enough power". Norris was leading and had already passed the pit lane entry when the call came. Stella measured the miss in seconds, telling F1 TV the neutralisation came "a couple of seconds too late" to catch Norris before the pit entry and that he "was a few seconds too early because then it was ending once he came in to pit". "I was the only driver on the whole grid who didn't get a pit stop under the VSC, and I lost around twenty seconds of race time because of it," Norris said afterwards.
That is the whole of it. A Grand Prix lead changed hands because a broken car came to rest close enough to an opening in the barrier that marshals could move it inside a single lap. Had it stopped anywhere without a gap in the barrier beside it, the recovery takes longer, the window stays open, Norris pits like everyone else, and the race is decided by the pace that Andrea Stella and Verstappen both said McLaren had.
Nobody is disputing the mechanism
Mercedes has now conceded the point in three voices. Antonelli said the team "were a little bit fortunate with the timing". Toto Wolff said the Virtual Safety Car "played into his hands". Andrew Shovlin was flattest of all: "we clearly benefited from the timing of the Virtual Safety Car". Stella, on the other side of it, said the timing "meant the win was taken from us" and that McLaren "reviewed all options, but the circumstances left us with no viable alternative strategy".
Russell's version is the one that shows how little strategy had to do with it. "The Virtual Safety Car came at the worst point for everyone who had started on the Hard tyre like me, and the best point for those who had started on the Medium," he said, and concluded that "no matter what we had done with strategy today we would have finished P5." A driver who worked for the same team as the winner, in the same car, on the same afternoon, describes his result as unreachable by any decision available to him.
Two caveats keep this from being a simple grievance. Verstappen also took the cheap stop and finished second, and says the win was not on for him regardless, because "Kimi and Lando were faster than me throughout". And Monza is the standing proof that a well-timed stop is not automatically a victory, since Antonelli had to go and take that one on track.
What the pair of them establish is narrower. A Virtual Safety Car distributes an advantage whose size depends on how long it lasts, and how long it lasts depends on where a failed car happens to come to rest. That is the variable, and it is the one the remedies now being floated go after.
What is now on the table
Norris has named two: keep a Virtual Safety Car out "at least for a lap, so it's equal for everyone", or close the pit entry for its duration to everything but a car with a puncture. Both fix the window's length rather than its timing, which is the right target. Stella is less sure there is a right answer, telling The Race "I'm puzzled myself as to what's right" and pointing the question at the Strategy Advisory Committee rather than at race control, whose officials he said "have done a good job according to what is the present". Verstappen expects it to come up at the next drivers' briefing. Formula 1 returns to Baku on 26 September.