Lusail, a three-way challenge shaped by strategy: how the race changes with Pirelli’s 25-lap limit
The 2025 Qatar Grand Prix presents a starting grid that perfectly mirrors the intensity of this year’s championship fight: Oscar Piastri, Lando Norris and Max Verstappen occupy the top three positions. It is a snapshot of a title battle reaching its peak, both technically and psychologically. With Lusail’s demanding lateral loads combined with the new Pirelli rules, tyre management becomes even more complicated and introduces a strategic variable capable of reshaping the race and opening unexpected tactical scenarios.
For Lando Norris, the mathematical chance of becoming World Champion already exists, but before calculation turns into celebration, he must first defeat his teammate and withstand the pressure of Max Verstappen. This is a duel that may be decided less by raw pace and more by how each driver manages the race from a strategic standpoint.
Gp Qatar: what happened in 2024
Lusail is a track that pushes drivers to the limit, testing who lifts off the throttle last in its high-speed, sweeping corners. Last year, the race produced an apparently straightforward strategic landscape, dominated by the superiority of the medium compound.
The preferred strategy was medium to hard with a single stop, ideally around lap twenty. However, most drivers extended tyre life well beyond Pirelli’s recommendations, reaching the thirty-lap range. It was in this risky zone that the punctures of Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz occurred, a clear reminder that Lusail punishes anyone who tries to stretch tyres beyond their limit.
Max Verstappen won that race with a perfectly executed medium-hard strategy, stopping on lap 35 under Safety Car conditions. Charles Leclerc mirrored the same approach to finish second, while Oscar Piastri pitted one lap earlier but still secured a podium. George Russell was the first to break the pattern, opting for an early stop on lap 23 and moving toward a two-stop race, which became even more viable thanks to tyre changes allowed during the neutralization.
The most unusual case involved Fernando Alonso, who finished seventh: after stopping on lap 35 for hard tyres, he immediately returned to the pits to switch back to mediums, successfully recovering all the positions initially sacrificed. It was a clear demonstration of how superior the yellow-walled compound was on a track that heavily punishes the front-left tyre.
Gp Qatar 2025: Pirelli dictates the strategy
This year, everything changes. Pirelli has imposed a strict 25-lap limit on every tyre set, counting cumulative laps across practice sessions, qualifying, and even Safety Car laps. The goal is to prevent a repeat of the structural failures seen in 2023. In practice, this rule forces the race into a mandatory two-stop strategy. No driver can attempt a 35-lap stint on mediums anymore. Instead, each driver must complete at least seven laps on the opening stint to maintain set rotation and then build the race around two long, almost symmetrical sequences.
Pirelli’s head of motorsport Mario Isola reiterated that all three compounds are theoretically viable. However, the official simulation suggests that the fastest option is medium-medium-soft, with two balanced middle stints and the soft compound reserved for the final part of the race, when the fuel load is lighter and the track is more rubbered in.
The ideal window for the first pit stop falls between laps 21 and 25, with margins tightening significantly for anyone who has already used part of a tyre’s lifespan during previous sessions. The second stop, for those adopting the conservative baseline approach, should occur between laps 40 and 46. The 19-lap Sprint did not produce major graining issues, but it highlighted significant wear on the front-left tyre, the most stressed area of this high-speed circuit.
This factor may push teams who lack confidence on the medium compound to rely more heavily on the hard in the middle stint, even while maintaining the same pit-stop windows. However, the inherently lower performance of the white-banded tyre compromises competitiveness compared to the optimal medium-medium-soft approach.
For the top ten, the main unknown remains the behaviour of the soft compound. No one used it during the Sprint, and the laps completed in practice were focused mainly on qualifying simulations rather than heavy-fuel stints. If the medium struggles more than expected, the soft will degrade even faster, making it a logical choice only for the very end of the race.
There is also a sensible and more cautious alternative: medium-hard-medium, with pit stops between laps 19-25 and 38-44. No team has two sets of new hard tyres available, meaning no one can attempt two consecutive stints on the white compound. By contrast, almost all teams possess two fresh sets of mediums, which naturally encourages a more linear and conservative approach.
The second half of the grid: Hamilton and the forced strategies
The drivers starting in the second half of the grid — including Lewis Hamilton beginning from P18 — face a different problem: the impossibility of deviating from Pirelli’s mandatory guidelines. There is no room for risky one-stop ideas, and any attempt at creative strategy will depend on the willingness to gamble on soft tyres at the start. This would involve a very short first stint of around seven laps to escape traffic, followed by two 25-lap stints on mediums. Mario Isola does not rule out this option, but it remains a high-risk approach and one highly sensitive to traffic variations.
A more balanced idea could be a hard-medium-medium strategy, with the same pit windows as the standard plan, or a hard-medium-soft approach, which delays both stops slightly — the first between laps 21 and 25, and the second between laps 40 and 46. Even here, the maximum-lap rule heavily affects strategy design and impacts the effectiveness of the undercut, which may become a powerful weapon for drivers trying to find clean air in a tightly packed midfield.
Weather conditions: no surprises expected
The weather will not introduce further uncertainty. The day will be dry, the evening will bring stable temperatures, and there will be a light headwind on the main straight without any risk of overheating. It is an ideal setting for a pure night race, where tyre management — rather than thermal degradation — will be the main complexity for teams and drivers.
Qatar is preparing to host a race that will not resemble last year’s edition. This Grand Prix will push drivers into a delicate balance between pace, control, and strategic discipline. In a championship decided on the smallest details, the victory will not depend solely on the direct duel between Piastri, Norris and Verstappen, but also on the ability to interpret tyre regulations that could ultimately define the final classification.
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