DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award: 2016 FORMULA 1 GRAND PRIX OF AUSTRIA

Williams, Williams, Williams: In the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award, there is no stopping the team led by Sir Frank Williams. Williams made it nine out of nine this season. Felipe Massa’s first stop took a mere 2.16 seconds, the speediest dispatch of all the drivers and teams in the Austrian Grand Prix at Spielberg.

Williams have continued their remarkable winning streak in the DHL Fastest Pit Stop Award. No driver in 2016 has benefited more from the prompt attention of his mechanics than the two Williams men, Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas. This is one of the reasons why the team is one of only two in the entire field to have finished every race in the points this year (the other being Ferrari). In the European Grand Prix at Baku, Williams even succeeded in breaking the pit-stop world record set by Red Bull in 2013 with a time of 1.92 seconds.

But the other teams competing at Spielberg also impressed with extremely fast pit stops. In P2 were Mercedes. Current championship leader Nico Rosberg was sent on his way in only 2.25 seconds with a change of tires to super softs – only a few hundredths of a second faster than Valtteri Bottas when the Finn made his first stop of the race. Red Bull also produced a strong fourth-place performance, servicing Daniel Ricciardo in 2.35 seconds.

Two stops instead of one

The expectations at Spielberg were that most teams would go for a one-stop strategy. In fact, most drivers pitted twice. Kimi Räikkönen, Max Verstappen, Romain Grosjean and Felipe Nasr were the only ones who made do with a single tire change. Force India driver Nico Hülkenberg actually completed three stops. Sebastian Vettel didn’t get the chance to visit the pits – one of the tires he had started on had a blow-out on Lap 26, and the former champion ended up in the barriers. The ensuing safety car deployment was the signal for many of the drivers to make an unscheduled pit stop.

Mercedes chose different strategies for their two cars. Rosberg and Hamilton both pitted twice, but the German switched to the soft compound after only six laps, having started on ultra softs. By contrast, Hamilton waited until Lap 22 when he also opted for the soft variant. By the time he emerged from the pit lane, Rosberg was in front of him. On Lap 55, the British driver stopped for a fresh set of soft tires, and Rosberg then came in one lap later for super softs.