[Donnchadh MacGarry]

Just to give another example of one strategy beating another, this time the hards wins out. On Thursday's race I started on pole so decided to go with softs to begin with and planned to go softs again for the 2nd stint. Matteo Venuti started 2nd and I knew he was starting on hards and planning on switching to softs at the 40:00-45:00 mark, we had been talking about tyre choice while watching James Tumilty's livestream just before the race (James was also streaming that race and makes some cool videos, I would recommend checking his channel out, link is   https://www.youtube.com/user/jtumilty).  I got a good start and got a few second lead in the first three laps, whereas Matteo dropped down to 8th on the first lap as he struggled off the line on hards and thus was forced off track at the first chicane. I went off at Acque Minerali after 5 minutes, and got a slow down penalty so I dropped back to third (or fourth can't remember which) and came out still ahead of Matteo by roughly 2 seconds. I began increasing my lead over Matteo by a few seconds again, partially due to traffic partially due to faster tyres. However from about the 15:00 to 30:00 mark, as my softs lost their performance Matteo had completely closed up on me and was on my gearbox, by this stage I was running 1st again and he was 2nd. I pitted at 30:00 and swapped to softs, Matteo stayed out so was now he was in 1st. I thought I had a chance to put in some quick laps and get another lead over Matteo when he came out of his pits on softs at the 40:00-45:00 mark. On my outlap I saw Matteo had a lap that was 15 seconds slower than normal, so I knew pitted on his next lap and was confused, it was too early for softs when starting on hards. Then it immediately clicked with me, he changed his pitstop plan where he only added 1L of fuel and kept the same tyres, meaning he had a 9 second pitstop quicker than me giving him a nice lead and track position. Sure enough when I saw his lead over me at the end of the next lap, the time differences matched up. I pushed like mad, but I knew I couldn't catch up unless he made a big mistake. At the 55:00 mark I reduced the lead to 4 seconds before going off at Acque Minerali again getting the same penalty, but by that stage it didn't matter, my tyres had just gone into the red zone of low grip so I wasn't going to catch up anymore. 

Looking at the standings afterwards, I lost about 14 seconds due to those two mistakes, and lost to Matteo by 12 seconds. However I still don't think I would have beaten him without those mistakes. He would have gotten track position and a lead with his faster pitstop anyways. While I would have caught up with him, I'm not sure if I would have the tyre life to pass him and then hold him off for the last few laps as my tyre grip went. Congrats again Matteo, it was an awesome race.