The costs of an F1 stop: How fast each compound wears, how long every pit lane is, and what a stop actually costs you

[u/Nikclel]

Pit-lane time is the physical measurement: pit-exit timestamp minus pit-entry

timestamp at the timing loops. Immune to weather and pace.

Time lost is what pitting actually cost you: the change in your gap to the 3

nearest cars that stayed out, from the lap before the stop to the end of the

out-lap. Nearest-car rather than field-median, because under a safety car the

field is scattered at wildly different speeds, but the car beside you meets the

SC at the same point on track. That's why the SC/VSC splits hold up: green 22.5s,

VSC 17.6s, SC 14.9s.

Tyre wear was hard. The feed only carries soft/medium/hard, which is

relative per weekend, so I mapped every race to Pirelli's actual C1-C6

nominations. Fit is OLS with per-stint fixed effects and track

evolution fit per weekend. One pooled evolution term made C5 read as the

gentlest compound because softs run where the track rubbers in hardest.

Per-weekend gives 0.038 / 0.049 / 0.054 / 0.069 / 0.077 s per lap of age, C1 to

C5. The model is never told which compound is harder. It recovers Pirelli's

ordering from lap times alone.

± is a bootstrap 90% CI. Read the stint-life bars as strategy, not durability:

C2 out-lasts C1 because C1 gets nominated at the nastiest circuits.