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A Formula 1 pit stop under green flag conditions costs 21.88 seconds. Under a virtual safety car it costs 18.13. Under a full safety car it costs 14.24.
Every stop in that data was called over the radio first. Hear them in our Spanish Grand Prix 2026 race radio archive.
So a safety car saves 7.6 seconds, which is 35% of the normal cost. A VSC saves 3.8 seconds, or 17%.
Both of those savings are smaller than the figures quoted everywhere else.
Verstappen took his first win of 2026 at Sepang. Hamilton started on slicks in the wet, fell to 17th, refused to pit, and finished on the podium.
Twenty four Canadian Grands Prix have been held at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve since 2000, and exactly twelve were won from pole. Lewis Hamilton has won seven, more than anyone has won at any other circuit bar Silverstone. Every winner, grid slot and safety car, measured.
Search for what a pit stop costs and you get ranges. Eighteen to twenty-eight seconds under green. A safety car saves forty to sixty percent. A VSC saves thirty to forty. Effective pit loss drops to twelve to fourteen seconds.
Every one of those is an estimate. None of them comes with a method.
That is odd, because the underlying data is public. Every lap time of every race is recorded, and so is the moment each car enters and leaves the pit lane. The cost of a stop is sitting there waiting to be counted.
So we counted it, across every race of the 2025 season.
The obvious method is to compare a driver's in-lap and out-lap against their own normal lap time. That is what we tried first, and it is wrong in a way that only shows up under a safety car.
It gave a sensible green-flag answer, 22.75 seconds. Then it said a safety car pit stop cost 70 seconds, which is impossible.
The reason is that under a safety car every lap is roughly thirty seconds slower. Comparing a safety car in-lap against a green-flag baseline does not measure the pit stop, it measures the safety car. Green flag looked right only because there the baseline and the conditions happened to match.
The fix is to stop using the driver's own history as the reference and use the rest of the field on those exact two laps:
pit loss = (pitting driver's in-lap + out-lap) minus (median lap time of every driver not pitting, on the same two laps)
Everyone else is running the same track, in the same conditions, at the same moment. Whatever the safety car is doing to lap times, it is doing to them too, so it cancels out entirely.
That is the number in this article. 485 green-flag stops, 20 under VSC, 25 under safety car.
The commonly quoted figure is that a safety car saves 40 to 60% of the pit stop cost. We measure 35%.
The VSC figure is further out. It is usually quoted at 30 to 40%. We measure 17%, less than half the low end.
The mechanism explains why the intuition overshoots. A neutralisation helps because the cars you are racing are circulating slowly while you are in the pit lane, so you lose less ground to them. But it does nothing for the part of the stop that is fixed. The pit lane still has a speed limit, the stationary time is unchanged, and the entry and exit still have to be driven. Only the comparison against the field improves, not the stop itself.
A VSC in particular keeps the field spread out. It slows everybody proportionally but nobody bunches up, so the gaps you would rejoin into are still roughly where they were. That is exactly why the saving is modest.
A full safety car does bunch the field, which is why it saves roughly twice as much as a VSC. But it still cannot make the pit lane shorter.
We have since measured the bunching itself, and it confirms this exactly: a full safety car deletes 71% of the field spread while a VSC deletes none of it. That is the mechanism behind the numbers above.
Pit loss is not one number. It varies by circuit more than most people realise, because it depends on how long the pit lane is, what the speed limit is, and how much time the entry and exit cost relative to the racing line.
Nearly ten seconds separates the most expensive pit lane from the cheapest.
This is why teams model pit loss per circuit rather than carrying one figure for the season, and why a strategy that works at Monaco is unthinkable at Imola. At Monaco you spend 17.85 seconds to change tyres. At Imola the same decision costs half a lap more.
A stop is worth roughly 22 seconds, so any gap under that is not a pit window. If a driver is 15 seconds clear of the car behind and stops, they come out behind. That single number explains most of the strategy calls you see.
A safety car is worth about a third of a stop, not most of one. When commentary says a team got a free pit stop, they did not. They got a 7.6 second discount on a 22 second cost.
A VSC is worth far less than a safety car. If a team pits under a VSC and a full safety car arrives two laps later, that is genuinely expensive bad luck, and now it has a number: they paid 18.13 when they could have paid 14.24.
Check which circuit you are at. The same call is a different decision at Imola and Monaco.
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The 22 seconds this article measures is spread across a detour you can follow live.
The Formula Dream app runs a live Dashboard through every session: every car moving on the circuit map, and a timing tower with lap times, gaps and intervals, tyre compound and age, pit counts and positions gained or lost. It is the same information these measurements come from, arriving live. You also get live driver radio as it is broadcast, and every FIA document of the weekend as it is published.
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