Around twenty people, four wheels, and about two seconds. The pit stop is the most rehearsed thing in sport, and it decides more races than overtaking does.
The car arrives at around 300 km/h, brakes into the pit lane, and stops on a mark painted on the ground. It has to be within a few centimetres of that mark, because twenty people are already standing where the wheels are going to be.
Three people per corner: one with the gun that undoes a single nut, one who pulls the old wheel off, one who pushes the new one on. Two more hold the car up on jacks front and rear. One watches for danger and gives the signal to go. Everyone has one job, nobody has two, and the whole thing is choreographed to the tenth of a second in a garage at the factory hundreds of times before the season starts.
Nobody puts fuel in. Refuelling during a race has been banned since 2010, because burning petrol next to a hot car with people around it was as dangerous as it sounds. Cars now start with all the fuel they will use, which is why they get faster as the race goes on and get lighter.
Tyres. An F1 tyre is designed to be brilliant and then to die. It gives enormous grip for a stretch of laps and then loses it quickly, and a driver on worn rubber can be two or three seconds a lap slower than the same driver on fresh rubber. Over ten laps that is half a minute. No amount of bravery gets that back.
There is also a rule: in a dry race every driver must use at least two different types of tyre. So even a driver whose tyres were somehow lasting perfectly still has to come in once. The teams know this, so the whole race becomes a question of when, not whether.
| Tyre | Sidewall colour | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Soft | Red | Fastest, dies soonest. Qualifying and short attacks. |
| Medium | Yellow | The compromise most races are built around. |
| Hard | White | Slowest, lasts longest. For long stints. |
| Intermediate | Green | A damp track, or a drying one. |
| Full wet | Blue | Standing water. Moves a lot of it, very fast. |
You are stuck behind a car you cannot pass. So you stop first. You come out on new tyres several seconds a lap quicker than the rival still circulating on old ones, and you use those laps to make up the time you lost in the pit lane. When he stops a lap or two later, he rejoins behind you. You have overtaken him without ever getting near him. That is an undercut, and it is the single most common way places change in modern F1.
The opposite exists too. Stay out while your rival stops, hammer in the fastest laps you can on old tyres while the track ahead of you is empty, and stop later with a gap big enough to rejoin in front. That is the overcut, and it works when the tyres are holding up better than everyone expected.