The Story on Stacking

It’s one of the issues that fires up fans – seeing your favourite car stationary in pitlane, while their teammate and main competitor is getting serviced and on their way. But stacking is sometimes a necessary evil. Engineer on Red Bull Racing Australia’s #888 Jeromy Moore explained why to v8supercars.com.au.

Fans feel Craig Lowndes is always stacking; we saw it again in Sunday’s race at the ARMOR ALL Gold Coast 600. Lowndes eventually finished that race eighth, while teammate Jamie Whincup was fourth.

However, Moore explained that while it was frustrating for the driver and team to sit stationary – and feel the points slipping away – in terms of track position it can still be more advantageous to wait those few seconds than stay on track, or split the strategy between the team’s two cars.

Sunday’s race was just bad luck, it seems.

“If the Safety Car makes it out when you can just make it to the end on fuel, you’re always at the risk of stacking,” Moore, who has been with the team since 2003, explained.

“Obviously you can’t stop the car any earlier, because you’ll run out of fuel, but you can’t stop two cars on the same lap.

“That race, there was only one lap of risk for us. So if the safety car was one lap later, both cars would have pitted and been out the way and it just so happened it was at the wrong time.”

The team calculated that stacking meant Lowndes only lost two spots to where he would have been if he had pitted the lap before – if he could have pitted the lap before. “It looks worse than reality,” Moore said. “There are a lot of times where – say Bathurst a few years ago, where Craig definitely lost a lot of positions having to stack – but this weekend it wasn’t as bad as it looked.”

Moore said the reason stacking was more prominent last year was the ability to alter fuel settings with the fuel trim switch. While the preference was always to run richer and go fast, there was the option to run lean to make it to the end of the race, meaning there was a greater window to pit for fuel.

He explained the overriding reason teams double-stacked cars was that staying out could be more detrimental that waiting those few seconds in the pits. 

“If you stay out there, everyone has come in behind you and fuelled up and they’re right behind you, although you’re p1, you’re first in the Safety Car train.

“You still have to stop, fuel up for say 25-28 seconds and come out behind everyone you could lose – at that track it was 33 seconds you lose just by doing a drive through and another 25-27 – so you’d be a minute behind the leaders if you chose to stay out, so that definitely was never an option.

“That’s the main reason we stack, it’s the lesser of two evils.”

On Sunday the team admittedly was running a conservative strategy. And while it would have been ideal to split the two cars, Moore didn’t want to leave co-driver Warren Luff in the car for an additional 30 or so laps.

“He, for whatever reason, was struggling – and so it might have been worse by waiting to put Craig in. And at that point in time, we were also considering we had just gotten the Championship lead – we didn’t want to risk anything. We did want to win, but not throw away points.”

In 2011, Lowndes led the Championship heading into the Gold Coast event by 100 points, but left with a 143 point deficit to Whincup. This year, #888 has managed to jump Whincup at that event – traditionally a bogey event for Lowndes – en route to two circuits the car has been consistently strong.

“We’re very happy about that, and really looking forward to the next two races.”

Another argument on stacking is cars should not be allowed to pit under safety car.

While Moore agrees that approach would stop the issue, there will always be times when every car will stop as early as possible. But he believes relative to Sunday’s race, Lowndes could have been even worse off, if he had to pit while the race was green.

“Generally safety cars are caused by people coming in and putting cold tyres on and heading out – so they always happen around the windows cars need to fuel up,” Moore explained.

“So more often than not you’d probably find it’d hurt more cars than not if you just left the rules the same as they are now.”

And finally, to put those conspiracy theorists to rest, he insisted there was no favouritism within the Triple Eight garage.

“If the roles were reversed and Craig was in front (on the track) definitely Jamie would be stacking. It’s just so often Jamie has qualified better, or for whatever reason has ended up in front on the track and so more often than not, Craig has taken the penalty. It’s just one of those things.

“The overriding factor at Triple Eight is we always work as a team so we can’t keep secrets from the other guys – our cards are always open and shown to the other guys and it’s really just left down to the drivers on the track.

“During the race, the engineers are always thinking, especially when racing each other, how to beat the other car – but it’s all fair.

“There’s no underhanded tactics, we just leave it up to the guys on track because it’s a drivers Championship after all.

“Roland (Dane, team boss) has drilled into us he wants to win the teams Championship and one of the cars the drivers championship so if we stuff up and run into each other or for whatever reason let another team in and beat us then, he won’t be too happy… It’s been like that the last three years in a row, definitely in 2011 it was down to the wire fighting each other in the Championship.”

Lowndes sits on 2549 points, leading Whincup on 2543 by six, followed by Pepsi Max Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom on 2461 and Will Davison on 2428.

In the teams standings, Red Bull Racing Australia has 5132 points and leads FPR, 4914, by 218.  Brad Jones Racing is third in the chase with 4195, 937 points behind the leaders.