Ferrari Formula 1 pit crew changing all four tyres during a pit stop at the 2017 United States Grand Prix, seen from above

How an F1 Pit Stop Changes Four Tyres in Under Two Seconds

August 19, 2026

Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing Formula 1 Tech Breakdown - where we take one confusing part of F1 and make it make sense. No engineering degree required.

The Short Version

A Formula 1 pit stop is four tyres, no fuel, and more than 20 people. A good one takes about 2.2 seconds from the car stopping to the car leaving. The world record is 1.80 seconds, set by McLaren on Lando Norris at the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix. It is that fast because each wheel is held on by a single nut, because the crew is choreographed down to tenths, and because the driver never has to wait for fuel.

First Thing to Know: There Is No Fuel

This is the detail that surprises most casual fans, and it explains everything else. F1 banned mid-race refuelling at the end of 2009, so from 2010 onward every car starts the race with all the fuel it will use. The ban came from a mix of safety worries and cost cutting, and it changed the pit stop completely.

When teams refuelled, the stop was as long as the fuel hose needed, usually six to twelve seconds. The tyre crew had time to spare. Once the hose went away, the tyres became the only thing standing between the car and the exit, and the entire sport went hunting for tenths of a second in a job that used to be the easy part.

Meet the Crew

Mercedes puts the number at up to 22 people involved in a single stop. Twelve of them are on tyres, three per corner, and that trio is the heart of the whole thing.

The gunner holds the wheel gun and does two jobs on the same corner: rip the old nut off, then drive the new one back on. The wheel-off pulls the used tyre clear the instant the nut releases. The wheel-on is already holding the fresh tyre and slots it onto the hub as the old one leaves. Three people, one wheel, roughly a second.

Around them: a front jack operator standing directly in the path of a car arriving at pit lane speed, a rear jack operator behind, two stabilisers holding the car steady so it does not rock on the jacks, two front wing mechanics ready to change the wing angle if the driver asks, and spare jack and fire crew standing by in case something goes wrong. Watching over all of it is the chief mechanic, who controls the lights that release the car.

Every red dot is a tyre job, every yellow dot is a jack, every blue dot is a hold-and-adjust job. The car arrives into a shape that was already set before it turned into the pit lane.

The Gun Is the Whole Trick

Each wheel on an F1 car is held on by one nut. Not five bolts like your car, and not five lugs like a NASCAR wheel. One. That single centre-lock nut is the reason four tyres can come off and go back on in about a second.

Formula 1 pneumatic wheel gun with its compressed air hose, the tool used to remove and refit the single centre-lock wheel nut — The wheel gun and its air line. That braided hose is not for show: the gun runs on compressed air at around 26 bar, roughly thirteen times the pressure in a car tyre. (Photo: Rich Jones, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The gun itself is a pneumatic impact wrench that spins at more than 10,000 rpm, and it flips itself between undo and tighten during the stop so the gunner never has to think about direction. Teams keep around two dozen of them in the garage, and top-spec guns run to roughly 5,000 euros each. They all come from the same Italian supplier, then every team modifies the grips and the internals for its own crew.

One quirk from the rulebook: the guns may be powered by air or nitrogen only. That rule exists because Mercedes turned up in 2011 running helium, which is lighter and let the gun spin up faster. It worked, so it got banned.

What Happens in Those 2.2 Seconds

Formula 1 has published the internal clock of a standard stop, and it reads like a drum pattern.

The wheels are off before most people watching have finished saying the word "pit". Everything after 1.4 seconds is the crew proving to the lights that the car is safe to release.

Mercedes breaks the same stop into feel rather than clock time: jacking the car and getting the nut off is about four tenths, the actual tyre swap is roughly a second, retightening is three tenths, dropping the car is under a tenth, and the driver's own reaction and launch is another three tenths. The driver is a meaningful part of the stop time, which is why some drivers are quietly better in the box than others.

The Record, and the Rule That Protects It

McLaren's 1.80 second stop for Norris came on lap 27 in Qatar in 2023 and took the record off Red Bull, who had held it at 1.82 seconds with Max Verstappen in Brazil in 2019. Two hundredths of a second, six years apart.

World Records are meant to be broken: @McLarenF1's lightning-fast 1.8-second pit stop for @LandoNorris not only tops the charts for this season, but sets an all-time #F1 record.
— DHL Motorsports (@DHL_Motorsports) October 8, 2023

Records like that stopped falling every few months for a reason. In 2021 the FIA got uneasy that teams were letting sensors trigger the next stage of the stop automatically, which is a fast way to release a car with a wheel that is not properly on. The rulebook already said sensor systems may only act passively, so the FIA put minimum human reaction windows into the procedure: at least 0.15 seconds between the wheels being fitted and the jacks dropping, and at least 0.2 seconds between the car being lowered and the car being released.

That is why the fastest stops now cluster just under two seconds instead of racing toward one and a half. The limit is no longer the equipment. It is the deliberate pause that keeps a person, not a sensor, responsible for letting the car go.

What Changed for 2026

The 2026 cars gave the crews a small gift. The tyres are narrower this season, by 25mm at the front and 30mm at the rear, and a full set is about 1.6 kilograms lighter than last year's. They are still 18-inch Pirellis, just slimmer and easier to carry. When your job is to hold a tyre at shoulder height for two seconds and then sprint it out of the box, every gram counts.

What You Will See at Zandvoort

The Dutch Grand Prix runs this Sunday, and Zandvoort has one of the tightest pit lanes on the calendar. Watch three things.

First, watch the front jack man. He stands in front of a car arriving at 80 km/h, which is the pit lane limit at almost every circuit, and he has to be underneath the nose before it fully stops. Second, watch the lights, not the wheels. Green comes on when every gunner has confirmed torque, so if a car sits still an extra half second, look for the corner where nobody has raised a hand. Third, count the stationary time against the time the driver loses overall. A 2.2 second stop is only the stationary part. Add the slow run down the pit lane at 80 km/h and a stop costs the driver roughly 20 seconds of race time at a typical circuit, which is why teams agonise over calling a driver in at all.

The Bottom Line

An F1 pit stop is not 20 people rushing. It is 20 people doing one small thing each, in an order they have rehearsed roughly 60 times over a single race weekend, with the whole sequence built around one nut per wheel and no fuel hose. The reason it looks impossible is that it very nearly is, and the reason it does not get any faster is that the FIA decided a human should always be the last one to say go.