Week 1: The pit wall

What a strategist actually decides, why a finishing position is too thin an evidence base to tell them whether they decided well, and what the rulebook fixes first

22 February 2027

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A call is a decision made during a race: pit now — come in for fresh tyres — or in three laps; this compound or that, a compound being one of the tyre specifications a car may run; cover the rival or let them go. You make it in seconds, on the information that has arrived so far. Then the race finishes and hands you a position — thin, partial evidence about the call, because the race you ran was one draw, and it either included a safety car (a neutralisation that bunches the field and changes what every strategy is worth) or it did not.

We derive that in the deck rather than asserting it. Results arrive too rarely, and carry too much you did not cause, to reliably tell a good call from a lucky one — and feedback too noisy to learn from is too noisy to grade fairly. How we assess this course follows from that, which is why you meet the structure in the same week as the argument for it.

You leave week 1 able to say what a strategist decides, and the order a race weekend hands them the information in; why a finishing position alone cannot establish how good a decision was; and what the rulebook fixes before anyone has an opinion — that the hard constraints come from regulation rather than taste, that a dry race requires two different tyre compounds so a stop is normally required, while a permitted tyre change during a suspension can also satisfy the rule if the race resumes, and that the regulator edits the decision space while everyone is still playing in it.

We also lay out the twelve weeks — the time trial, the contest, the uncertainty, whether any of it can be judged, and then the race — and state the doctrine you are held to from here: you do not overrule your own instrument, the race simulator you spend the semester building, on instinct. Disagreement with it is a bug report.

The session is a drop-in for getting a development environment working, and it carries no marks. Attendance is the optional part: its page lists three things you need running before week 2, and you need them whether or not you come.

Five things are marked: the labs in weeks 2 to 12, Assignment 1, the audit, in week 8, and the final project’s three deliverables — the instrument, the race and the defence. Their pages carry the weights and dates. None of them is a result: your finishing position is worth nothing.