PWP: The Strategist slips up at Silverstone

Williams Racing excelled at the British Grand Prix, with the Safety Car's timing helping Alex Albon to points and Logan Sargeant's best F1 finish.

Yet that same success didn't translate to the scores in our free-to-play game, Pit Wall Predictions, presented by Gulf, as a low-scoring weekend had most players scrambling for points.

If you took 15 points or more, you did better than most, with 2/8 being the most common score, as late pit stops and the durability of Pirelli's soft tyre caught out many players.

Don't feel too bad if you didn't score highly, our secret guru inside Williams Racing, The Strategist, was oddly quiet around the factory today after taking just five points from our home race in a particularly tricky round.

At the other end of the scale, three players can loudly celebrate with their 35 points — the highest tally of anyone from this weekend, making it tight at the top where four players share 210 points.

See where The Strategist went wrong by scrolling down, and click the link below to find out if your predictions succeeded or struggled in Silverstone.

Pirelli's updated tyre construction introduced at Silverstone proved to be very durable rubber that had Alex take his medium compound 32 laps into the race.

The Strategist expected a two-stop race, expecting a first stop between laps 11-20. The one-stop caught them, and 99% of players, out. Just 1% chose the correct answer of Lap 31-40.

Logan didn't quite reach the Kevin Magnussen-induced Safety Car to benefit from a less-impactful pit stop, but he still managed a respectable 29 laps on the medium rubber.

That meant the Lap 21-30 answer was the right call, as 22% of you predicted, with 65% incorrectly following The Strategist in thinking it'd come much earlier between laps 11 and 20.

Alex is usually the first FW45 in the pit lane, but that trend didn't continue in Silverstone, with Sarge's Lap 29 stop making him the first of our drivers to pit.

This switch caught out 60% of players, including The Strategist, meaning the 40% minority took five points here.

The one-stop strategy proved the clear favourite for most of the 20 drivers, and our pair were no exception, to make it two pit stops between Alex and Logan.

Impressively, 35% of players got this right, with two stops being the most common answer. The Strategist followed their Austrian call of the race being a two-stopper for each FW45 and slipped up once again.

Pirelli's long-lasting compounds allowed us to put Alex onto the racier softs for the remaining laps after the Safety Car, helping him surge past Carlos Sainz and grab more points.

Only 10% of players thought softs would be the race-finishing rubber, and The Strategist wasn't one of them, instead thinking it would be the mediums.

Although he pitted before the Safety Car, Sarge also benefited from the red-walled tyre for his final 23 laps.

As with question five, soft tyres weren't a popular choice; just 11% of players correctly called this. With The Strategist expecting a medium-hard-medium race, they didn't score points here.

History suggested a VSC would be unlikely, with Silverstone last seeing a full-circuit virtual slowdown way back in 2016, but the 2023 British Grand Prix had a brief VSC spell before the Safety Car appeared.

Almost half of players got this correct, with 47% choosing "1" as their answer, but not The Strategist, who chose "0".

Only Magnussen's mechanical failure caused a slowdown in Silverstone, and the VSC mentioned in Q7 morphed into a full Safety Car within a lap.

68% of players thought there'd be one Safety Car appearance, and The Strategist restored a little pride by being part of that group.

It was a dismal showing from The Strategist on home turf, with the expected two-stop strategy leading to many incorrect predictions. They slip to 94th in the leaderboard but will look to bounce back in Hungary.