49 laps on hards: could Yuki Tsunoda have scored points in the Saudi GP?

After the first-lap safety car at Formula 1's Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, three cars chose to take a strategic gamble and make their tyre switches there and then: Esteban Ocon, Gabriel Bortoleto, and Jack Doohan.

The three all started on the medium tyre, but made the swap to ensure they could theoretically go without making a further stop – so long as they could keep hold of the hard tyre through the remainder of the race. Ocon and Bortoleto chose to go down that road; Doohan made a further stop on lap 32.

It didn't have much of a pay-off for the three; although they made up places during the pitstop crossover, they could do very little to stop sinking back down the order with the tyre offset accrued by those who had made their stops later. Ocon finished 14th, while Doohan used his fresher tyres to pass Bortoleto for 18th towards the end.

There's a parallel world where Yuki Tsunoda, having got going again after his opening-lap clash with Pierre Gasly at Turn 4, had no damage and followed the three onto the same strategy. The thought experiment here is this: could the Japanese driver have got into the points by doing so?

To map the hard-tyre degradation on an ideal race strategy, we'll take a function of Ocon and Bortoleto's laps to present the best case scenario. The three who stopped caught up to the back of the pack before the restart, so we'll place Tsunoda at the tail end of that and start our count from the fourth lap.

Then we'll work out a best-guess expected delta between Tsunoda and the mash-up of the Ocon/Bortoleto theoretical driver based on the previous races' supertimes – Tsunoda at 100.838%, "Bortocon" at 101.932% – sure, this has Tsunoda's Racing Bulls results included, but let's take the liberty of including reduced pace running through the pack. In theory, this has the time loss to traffic bedded into it, so we won't adjust that too much.

Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

In Bortoleto's traces, there's two points of note; between lap 21 and 27, he dropped time as he was being overtaken by the cars who had stopped; Ocon also lost time in this phase of the race, although not quite as much as Bortoleto did. We'll not smooth those curves out too much, since this also accounts for areas where Tsunoda may start to come under attack from drivers on better tyres. This is a conservative estimate, after all.

To place Tsunoda at the back of the field, we'll add in the time under the safety car to ensure he's at the back of the pack, and assume he makes up the stoppage time while halted at Turn 4 to do so. Bortoleto was half a second off Ocon at the restart, so let's make his gap over Tsunoda the same. As per the other hard runners, Tsunoda thus takes a couple of laps to bring the tyres in, clocking a 1m37.128s and a 1m35.791s on his opening two laps.

He then gets into the 1m34s, lapping pretty consistently within the bracket (aside from a few 1m35s having contended with traffic) before getting into the high 1m33s by lap 33. This still puts him over a second a lap behind Verstappen, sporting new hard tyres, although he tails off back into the 1m34s in the final couple of laps as the degradation sets in.

Adding his race lap data to the time spent under the safety car, per our maths, brings Tsunoda to an eighth-place finish, having crossed the line at 1h21m50.586s, in the pocket ahead of Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon – and about five seconds behind Lewis Hamilton.

In all likelihood, this is a very optimistic forecast, even if the degradation that Ocon and Bortoleto faced through the race is naturally included within the calculations of Tsunoda's race laps.

But it does show that, had Tsunoda not sustained terminal damage, there was a chance for him to make up the places and wring a points finish out of the hard tyres if he didn't get completely swamped amid the traffic. Aiming for the 25-second gap between Hamilton and Sainz at the end, even with some greater variance in lap times, would likely have been achievable.

It's not a strategy that would have, for a car at the top, upgraded a points finish into a better one. But it certainly would have helped one of them out of a jam had they come to blows on the opening lap and needed a hail Mary to get something out of the race.