When a race is red-flagged, the cars stop in the pit lane and teams are allowed to change tyres while they wait. That change counts towards the rule that every driver must use two different dry compounds, so it can replace a pit stop. It costs nothing.
Red flags and restarts are announced to drivers by radio first, and the reaction is immediate. Every message from the last race is in our Spanish Grand Prix 2026 race radio archive.
A driver who has already stopped has spent nearly 22 seconds doing it. A driver who has not just got the same thing free.
And the wait is usually about half an hour. We timed every race suspension from 2021 to the 2026 Italian Grand Prix that had an official restart time: 22 of them, with a median of
That free tyre change is the single most consequential rule in this article. It has decided real races, and the sport's own chief executive has said it needs fixing. It is still there.
What is a red flag in F1?
A red flag stops the session. Race control uses one when an incident is too large to manage any other way: a major accident, a barrier needing repair, debris that cannot be cleared under a safety car, or weather that has become unsafe.
Under Article B5.14.2 of the Sporting Regulations, the message "RED FLAG - RACE SUSPENDED" goes to every team, red flags are shown at every marshal post, overtaking is forbidden, the pit exit is closed, and all the cars drive slowly into the pit lane and line up in the fast lane.
The timing does not stop. What happens instead is that the length of the suspension is added to the race's two-hour limit, up to a maximum total race duration of three hours.
How long does a red flag last in F1?
There is no fixed duration. A red flag lasts as long as it takes to make the circuit safe. But the recent record gives a clear typical range.
For every race suspension from 2021 to the 2026 Italian Grand Prix, we measured the time from the red flag to the restart time race control announced: 22 suspensions, a median of 27.6 minutes. The middle half ran from about 24 to 35 minutes.
Race
Red flag to restart
2022 Japanese GP
126.8 minutes
2022 British GP
52.4 minutes
2022 Monaco GP
44.6 minutes
2023 Dutch GP
42.7 minutes
2024 Monaco GP
39.9 minutes
2026 Monaco GP
36.9 minutes
2026 Italian GP
31.3 minutes
2026 Dutch GP
27.5 minutes
2023 Australian GP (first)
16.0 minutes
2023 Australian GP (second)
14.9 minutes
How long F1 race suspensions lasted, from the red flag to race control's announced restart time
The longest was weather: Suzuka in 2022 was stopped for more than two hours by rain. The shortest came at Melbourne in 2023, which had three red flags in one race, two of them over in about a quarter of an hour.
Because the stoppage is added to the two-hour limit, a long red flag does not shorten a race on its own. It only ends a race early if the three-hour total runs out first. The full timing rules are in how long an F1 race is.
Does a red flag count as a pit stop?
Not officially, but in practice it can replace one. While the cars are stopped, Article B5.14.4 lists the work teams may do, and "changing wheels and tyres" is on it. In a dry race every driver must use at least two different dry-weather tyre specifications, and tyres fitted in the pit lane count as used once the car leaves with them. So a driver who switches compound during a red flag has met the requirement without making a stop.
It is also effectively free. Under green flag conditions a pit stop costs a driver 21.88 seconds on average, and between 17.85 and 27.52 seconds depending on the circuit. Those are measured figures: we measured every pit stop of the 2025 season. A red-flag change costs nothing, because the whole field is stationary.
A red flag makes the stop free, but only for the drivers who have not stopped yet. Anybody who pitted five laps earlier has paid full price for something their rival has just been handed.
Lando Norris was publicly critical of exactly this after the São Paulo Grand Prix, and Stefano Domenicali, F1's chief executive, has said the loophole should be fixed. It has not been: the 2026 regulations still allow tyre changes during a suspension.
There is a defensible reason it exists. Cars sitting in a pit lane in changing conditions need to be safe to restart, and forcing teams to send a car back out on ruined or inappropriate tyres would be worse. But the competitive consequence is real, and it is essentially random: whether a red flag helps or hurts you depends entirely on when you happened to stop.
How does an F1 race restart after a red flag?
When the circuit is ready, race control announces a resumption time and publishes a resumption order, taken from the last point at which the position of every car could be determined. The cars leave the pit lane behind the safety car, and race control declares one of two restart types.
A standing restart: the safety car pulls in and the cars line up on the grid and start again from a standstill, exactly like the start of a race.
A rolling restart: the cars are released from behind the safety car while still moving. It is used when a standing start is judged unsafe, most often in the wet.
In practice the standing restart dominates. Of the 22 suspensions we timed, 15 restarted from a standing start and 7 rolling, and six of those seven rolling restarts came in wet conditions: Imola 2021, Monaco 2022 twice, Suzuka 2022, Zandvoort 2023 and Interlagos 2024.
The distinction matters because a standing restart resets everything. A driver who has spent twenty laps building a two-second gap arrives on a grid with that gap deleted, alongside a rival who may now be on fresher tyres they did not pay for.
What happens if the race cannot restart?
If a suspended race cannot be resumed, the result is taken at the end of the penultimate lap before the lap on which the red flag was shown. Stop a race during lap 10 and the result is the order at the end of lap 8.
The points then depend on how far the race got. No points are awarded unless the leader has completed at least two laps without the safety car or virtual safety car. After that:
Distance completed by the leader
Points for 1st to 10th
Two laps to under 25%
6, 4, 3, 2, 1 (top five only)
25% to under 50%
13, 10, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (top nine)
50% to under 75%
19, 14, 12, 9, 8, 6, 5, 3, 2, 1
75% or more
Full points: 25, 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1
Points for a Grand Prix that cannot be completed
The sliding scale replaced a blunter half-points system after the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix, where the cars only ever ran behind the safety car and half points were still awarded. A race stopped at 60% distance and one stopped at 30% are no longer treated identically.
What a red flag actually does to a race
Three things happen at once, and they compound.
Tyre advantage is redistributed, in favour of whoever had not yet stopped.
Gaps are deleted. Everything earned on track since the last neutralisation is gone.
Strategy resets. Every plan built around a stop window is void, and teams have minutes to build a new one while the cars sit still.
This is why red flags produce results that look nothing like the race that preceded them, and why they generate more argument than any other intervention in the sport.
A worked example: Monza, 2026
The 2026 Italian Grand Prix is the cleanest demonstration of all three effects in one afternoon, so it is worth walking through.
Charles Leclerc spun at Parabolica on lap 2 and hit the barrier hard. Race control put out double yellows in the final two sectors, deployed the safety car, then suspended the race on lap 3. The red flag came out at 15:07 local time and the race resumed at 15:39. Twenty one cars were still running, and every one of them took new tyres during the suspension.
Tyre advantage was redistributed. Nobody had made a real stop yet, three laps in, so the free change went to the whole field at once. That sounds neutral. It was not, because it also handed everyone a free choice of compound with fifty laps left, which is a decision teams normally make under pressure with a pit window closing. The field split. Most cars fitted the hard and planned to run to the flag. Four fitted the medium.
Driver
Opening 3 laps
After the red flag
Stops
Russell
Medium
Hard, laps 4-53
1
Norris
Medium
Hard, laps 4-53
1
Gasly
Medium
Hard, laps 4-53
1
Hamilton
Soft
Medium, laps 4-53
1
Verstappen
Soft
Medium to 28, then hard
2
Antonelli
Hard
Medium to 28, then medium
2
The free change at Monza was not one decision, it was two: which tyre, and whether to commit to one stop or two.
Gaps were deleted, and the grid was rewritten. The restart order is not the starting grid, it is the running order at the moment the race was suspended, which is why race control publishes a resumption order. Kimi Antonelli had started nineteenth after a power unit penalty and had climbed to twelfth in three laps. Twelfth is where he restarted. Seven positions of recovery that would normally have taken twenty laps of green flag running were already banked, and the fifty second cushion the leaders had been building was gone.
Strategy reset, and it decided the race. Antonelli's second set of mediums, taken under a virtual safety car on lap 28, was worth 1:24.663 a lap over the final stint against Russell's 1:25.366 on fifty lap old hards. Seven tenths a lap for twenty laps is fourteen seconds, and fourteen seconds was exactly the gap. He led on lap 50 and won.
None of that happens without the red flag. Leclerc's crash was on lap 2 of 53.
The full stint and pace data is in our Italian GP race report. The restart being rebuilt in real time is audible in the Monza race radio, where the pit walls work through the resumption order while the cars are stationary, and we went through the weekend message by message in our Italian GP radio piece.
Why the free stop is not the same for everybody
The rule is written to be neutral and it lands unevenly, which is the source of most of the argument about red flags.
A driver who pitted on the lap before the suspension has paid roughly twenty five seconds of track time for a set of tyres that everybody behind has just been given. A driver who was about to pit gets that stop for nothing. At Monza the timing was kind, because the flag came before anyone had committed, but move the same crash to lap 25 and the same rule produces a completely different set of winners and losers with no change in anyone's driving.
There is no version of the rule that avoids this. Leaving cars on their old tyres for a restart is a safety problem, and freezing the strategic state of a race is not something a rulebook can do. It is a genuine trade, not an oversight.
Our app collects every one of those documents as it is released. Alongside it, during a session it puts every car on the circuit map with a timing tower carrying gaps, intervals, tyre compound and tyre age, pit stop counts and positions gained or lost, with alerts for safety cars and yellow and red flags. Driver radio streams live with the transcript beside it, which during a red flag is where the strategy is being rebuilt out loud.
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There is no fixed length, but across 22 race suspensions from 2021 to 2026 the median was 27.6 minutes from the red flag to the restart. The longest was the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix, at almost two hours and seven minutes, and the shortest about 15 minutes.
Does a red flag count as a pit stop?
Not officially, but a tyre change during a red flag counts towards the rule that drivers must use two different dry compounds, so it can replace a pit stop for free.
Can teams change tyres under a red flag?
Yes. The 2026 Sporting Regulations list changing wheels and tyres among the work allowed while the cars are stopped in the pit lane, along with repairing genuine accident damage.
Is the restart after a red flag a standing start?
Usually. Race control chooses between a standing and a rolling restart, and 15 of the 22 restarts we timed were standing. Rolling restarts are mostly used in the wet.
What happens if a race cannot restart after a red flag?
The result is taken from the end of the penultimate lap before the lap on which the red flag was shown, and reduced points apply if the leader completed less than 75% of the distance.
Method
Suspensions: FastF1 race control messages for every Grand Prix from 2021 to the 2026 Italian Grand Prix. Duration is from the "RED FLAG" message to the resumption time race control announced, converted to the same local time using each event's UTC offset. The 2021 Belgian Grand Prix, which never restarted, and suspended starts before the first lap are not included.
Restart type: the "STANDING START" or "ROLLING START" message race control sent before each resumption.
Singapore Sprint 2026 Results: Russell Crashes From the Lead
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