Anti-racing or ingenuity? Monaco's hold-up tactics might be in F1 for good

If there's anything I've learned in my 25-plus years of watching Formula 1, it's that changing the rules to elicit a certain outcome usually tends to deliver an unintended consequence - then, the accidental opening of a can of worms.  

Cast your mind back to a year ago, and you'll probably remember the FIA's two-stop experiment in the 2025 Monaco Grand Prix if you haven't already purged it from your mind palace. Since races in Monaco usually resolve in turgid one-stop affairs, as it's far too easy to get trapped in a conga line of cars if you deviate from the norm, the FIA wanted to open the race up to strategic variance. 

Presumably, it was pitched as thus: Do you take the gamble on doing both stops early, catch up, and wait for the rest of the field to do their stops? Or do you hang it out until the end, and hope you've got the gap over the rest of the field? As it happened, the teams that tried the first outcome tended to stay at the back, and it was actually more beneficial to wait and see what everyone else did first.

On that afternoon, Racing Bulls chose to make its own luck. With Isack Hadjar running fifth in the early stages of the race, the team knew a potentially hefty haul of points was on the cards, a valuable commodity amid the cut-and-thrust of a compressed midfield battle. At the same time, it had Liam Lawson running in ninth; if there was, say, a massive space in front of him, Hadjar could do his two stops and stay within the top 10, and then move up when others did their stops later into the race.

So, Lawson started backing off from lap six, lapping at a painfully slow pace to accelerate the growth of the gap between he and Hadjar. The Frenchman was 20 seconds clear as early as lap 14, and peeled in for the first of his stops to emerge in eighth, one place ahead of his team-mate. Lawson then continued in his role to frustrate the rest of the pack, buying even more time for Hadjar to get his second stop done just five laps later. 

With Hadjar then free to chase down Ocon and Alonso (who duly retired anyway) to bring himself up to sixth by the close of the race, Lawson looked like he was in no-mans-land. Williams helped his cause considerably, copying Racing Bulls' idea to keep Albon and Sainz in the top 10, which opened up two gaps for Lawson to conduct his own stops. 

The point is this: the FIA, and those among the teams who had championed the two-stop idea, probably hadn't bargained for this. By repealing the two-stop rule for 2026, the hold-up antics - which continued to disseminate through the field, albeit to a lesser effect each time they were employed - would surely not translate to a standard race?

Follow me! Sainz backed the pack up to help Albon carve out a free pitstop

Photo by: Dom Gibbons / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Not so; the cat was now out of the bag. For a time, it looked like nobody was going to assume the role of stopper-in-the-bottle, without the pressure of needing to get an extra stop done, but one look at Carlos Sainz's gap to Alex Albon circa lap 33 suggested that Williams had begun to set the wheels in motion. Sainz had been sitting about three seconds shy of his team-mate through the opening phase of the race but, with valuable points on the table, Williams instructed him to slow down. Franco Colapinto soon got a face-full of the FW48's exhaust fumes, which he could do little about.

Sainz did this for about 10 laps, which had opened a sufficient gap for Albon to pit into. In a smidgen of poetic justice, Lawson had also been angling for some clear pace and, for the second year in a row, assumed the benefit of Williams' decision to try and lock out the lower points by pitting a lap later. Presumably, the Kiwi has a fruit basket on order for James Vowles' squad, if to thank them for their kindness...

Williams tried to execute the second half of its plan by reversing positions, in allowing Sainz to scamper away as Albon was put in charge of holding everyone up. This was not popular with Albon; his queries over the radio gave the impression of a man willing to pull up the drawbridge, in a display of I've-got-mine recalcitrance. 

But now that the worms are out of the can, is there any way to dissuade teams from repeating this next year - or do we simply accept that this is normal?

What we didn't know at the time was that he was nursing a deployment issue, and that he was going to have a much more difficult time attempting to separate his team-mate from the braying mob behind. Indeed, Arvid Lindblad trickled through; Albon locked up at the chicane, and it looked as though he'd let the Briton through to avoid a penalty; instead, he had no drive out of Antony Noghes and Lindblad cruised past. It might have been more fortunate this way, at least compared to receiving a penalty for gaining a lasting advantage.

"Yeah, I wasn't unhappy with the teamwork. I understand how this works. More just, I felt very vulnerable out there," Albon reflected afterwards. "I had a deployment issue the whole race and we were losing four or five tenths down the straights. And then on top we were trying to do the same game as last year. 

"If anything I was frustrated more because I felt like I let the team down. I lost a position to Arvid into Turn 1, partly down to my deployment issue and I thought, by us trying to be smart, we've actually now got both cars out of the points.

Albon struggled to return the favour for Sainz, having picked up a battery deployment problem

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

"At the time I didn't know the situation of who was having DNFs and what not. For me it was like, were we too clever at that time in the race? In the end it worked out. I think if the red flag didn't happen Arvid obviously wouldn't finish in front of us. So in many ways we were okay, but at the time I thought there's no way I'm going to be able to hold all these cars behind me."

McLaren attempted to do a similar trick to help Piastri overcut George Russell, by asking Lando Norris to call time on his pursuit of Pierre Gasly and keep the Mercedes behind. However, Norris was in trouble and nursing an engine issue, which eventually proved to be terminal. 

What is abundantly surprising is that few have sought to try this strategy in Monaco before, at least not in recent memory. It now seems that the hold-up tactic has become a useful tool for the midfielders looking to cement their places in the top 10, albeit with the requirement that both cars are in reasonably proximity to each other on-track. It's also evident that, looking across comments sections and social media, this is an increasingly unpopular game plan. 

It's clever, certainly. Everyone goes into the Monaco weekend with the expectation that passing will be nigh-on impossible; the straights are too short to use any of the overtaking tools, and even a run out of the tunnel into the Nouvelle Chicane is far more likely to end in tears. Assuming the car tasked with slowing down the pace has no issues, it's actually quite low-risk - at least, for one car. The other car is a largely sacrificial element here; per 2025, Lawson probably wouldn't have scored points if Williams hadn't adopted the same tactics.

But now that the worms are out of the can, is there any way to dissuade teams from repeating this next year - or do we simply accept that this is normal? It's hard to think of a rule that would cover this off without targeting drivers who are managing an issue, or just plain slow on any given day. Alternatively, if the FIA wanted to punish it under the auspices of driving unsafely, it would be entirely at odds with its road safety programme...

It also risks becoming another aspect that is over-regulated and unclear in its messaging. Do you set a maximum race lap time, at the risk of inundating the stewards with hundreds of laps that are beyond the cut-off because someone overshot a corner? Can you really tell a driver to stop defending their position, on the off-chance that it might help their team-mate? As much as it's a bit unsightly, trying to fix it comes with the worry that the first sentence of this column encapsulates: trying to elicit a certain outcome can have unintended consequences. 

Besides, it's not like holding up drivers to benefit your team-mate is taking anything away from the Monaco spectacle, and it merely takes advantage of the traffic jams that are bound to form regardless for tactical purposes. Unless there's heavy weather to spice things up, the Monaco Grand Prix is never going to be a thrill-a-minute affair; we've got to stop pretending that it can be anything other than processional. 

Monaco has always been the same: great on Saturdays, dull on Sundays

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images