Bizarre statistic for Stake F1 team in 2024: This is how you lose races!
F1 News
- Ludo van Denderen
The Stake F1 team are not having a fine start to the season. Two Grands Prix driven, twice drivers Guanyu Zhou and Valtteri Bottas finished their race outside the points. Yet as bad as it seems at first glance, the Swiss team's car is not the leading cause for this. Zhou, for instance, had prospects of a point in Saudi Arabia, but a dramatic pit stop spoiled his race.
2024 was certainly not the first time things went completely wrong in the pit lane for Stake F1. In the opening race of the season in Bahrain, Bottas lost a lot of time because a wheel was not fixed properly. In total, the Finn stood still for no less than 52 seconds. A week later in Jeddah, things went wrong again, this time with Zhou. He also had a slow wheel change.
The team have made it clear what the problem is: the mechanics are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, it does not seem to be their fault. But the wheel nuts the Swiss are working with appear to have a so-called cross thread , which causes the wheel nuts to spin out of control. Stake have several updates for their cars in the pipeline for the upcoming Australian Grand Prix. But the team realises that without having fixed the wheel nut problem, no results are going to be achieved.
That's how long Stake F1 had been idle
Just how dramatic Stake F1's pit stops have been this season is shown by this statistic. The team's two drivers made seven pit stops in 2024. In the process, they stood still for a total of 100.1 seconds. In comparison, Carlos Sainz did 34 stops in the whole of 2023 at Ferrari. In total, the Spaniard stood still for tyre changes for 98.14 seconds.