They look at the maths of tyre degradation versus track position, mostly. If the tyres fall off a cliff and you lose twenty seconds, a second stop is faster, even with the pit lane loss. But you have to clear traffic after.
In my first year, I modelled the 2021 French GP for an assignment. Verstappen’s winning two-stop seemed slower on paper, but his fresh tyres at the end let him chase and pass. The simulation never predicted that pass—the human driver made the maths wrong. So sometimes, the strategy is to force the other guy to crack.
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