“For me it was very clear that the track, on that lap we stopped, was completely dry, apart from Turn 7 and 8,” Fernando Alonso reflected, discussing his call to pit for medium tyres at the end of lap 54 of an unusual Monaco Grand Prix. He’d discussed the weather forecast with his Aston Martin engineers, and the conclusion was that incoming rainfall would amount to nothing more than “a small shower”. Expecting it to pass, the team stuck to its guns with its medium-hard tyre strategy, and Alonso was expecting a few laps of clinging on at the Fairmont Hairpin and Portier before the rain subsided.
Then the heavens creaked open a little more. More of the circuit was awash, and Alonso was forced into quickly conceding defeat by collecting the intermediate tyre on the next lap, following race leader Max Verstappen into the pits and emerging over 20 seconds behind.
The race had been a tepid affair until that point, and the battle for victory was all but over as Verstappen coaxed his medium compound tyres far beyond any expected drop-off in performance. Alonso, furnished with hard tyres as he and Aston Martin opted to take the opposite strategy to the Red Bull ace, had put his chips on the mediums falling off sooner over the course of the 78-lap race.
Instead, the hards proved slightly susceptible to graining, particularly on the rear-left corner. The medium compound was not immune to this, and Verstappen had to go through his own graining phase, but proved more consistent in keeping tyre temperature within the correct window. Starting on the hards also
