PWP: The Strategist searches for strong returns in Zandvoort

After a few weeks to reflect on the first half of the 2023 season, ‘The Strategist’ is ready to go again after the summer break.Sitting in P123 in our leaderboard with 195 points to their name, our secretive Grove guru has a good foundation to build upon heading into the final 10 rounds of Pit Wall Predictions, presented by Gulf.

It all starts again this weekend in the Netherlands, but will you follow their advice or forge your own path?

Read on for The Strategist’s tips and insights for the 2023 Dutch GP.

Lap 11-20. It looks like a two-stop will be the quickest way around Zandvoort, with the first stop coming in the window of lap 18-23. With that in mind, I’m backing Alex to make an aggressive early stop.

Lap 21-30. He will be in the same window, but I predict Logan will come into the box after Alex. This has been the theme throughout most of 2023 so far, which means he could fall into the third bracket of our prediction game.

Alex. As mentioned above, Alex has stopped first at three quarters of our races so far, so I expect the trend will continue as we kick off the second half of 2023.

P11-P15. I predict we’ll be battling close to the points when we make our first stop. We’re aware this isn’t a track strongly suited to us, so I think this could be a realistic early prediction. But, who knows what our drivers could achieve?

0.1-2.5s. I predict Alex will be battling hard, right in the mix with the cars around him, so I’m going for the narrowest gap possible.

0.1-2.5s. Similarly to Alex, I expect Logan to be battling in the mix. We know how good our American is at battling through the field having gained the most positions on the opening lap of anyone so far in 2023, so this is certainly a possibility on the Dutch dunes.

Zero. We did see one VSC period last year, but I’m going for no deployments of the VSC in 2023. If there is an incident, I think it’s more likely to be a full Safety Car on this narrow, twisty circuit.

One. 2022 was the first time we saw the deployment of the Safety Car at Zandvoort, but as mentioned previously, this is a narrow circuit for 20 large F1 cars to navigate. I think we could see some chaos or at least some form of attrition throughout the 72 laps of the Dutch GP.