The potential for chaos at Monaco this weekend is immense. Quite aside from the standard perils of the place – the close-up walls and mercurial weather among them – another variable has been thrown into the mix by the new stipulation that everyone must make at least two stops, using at least three sets of tyres.

“My head’s still untwisting itself,” said Oscar Piastri after coming out of the pre-weekend McLaren strategy briefing.

The strategy implications of this new stipulation are indeed mind-numbing, given the high probability of safety car periods around here. It imposes a very high upside reward for risk lower down the field and a very high level of risk if you’re running at the front. At anywhere below the top 10 it’s going to be mighty tempting to stop early and get at least one pitstop out of the way (or maybe even both of them). Then you’ll be running at the back but if the safety car arrives at the right time, you could be ready for a jackpot bonanza of a result, with track position over faster cars on a circuit where passing is close to impossible.

For the frontrunners, will it be better to push on, so as to create a gap in the traffic to drop into as soon as possible? Or do you do the familiar Monaco thing of running a long way off the pace so as to make any undercut threat null and void by bunching up the whole field?

How about the offset of strategies between cars on the same team? “You really don’t want to be behind your team-mate on the grid,” said Yuki Tsunoda, who will almost certainly be behind his team-mate on the grid, ironically).

What he’s referencing here is how a team might use its lower-placed driver to back the field up to allow the lead driver to create a gap which will minimise his place losses when he stops (à la Kevin Magnussen at Jeddah last year, performing a service which got team-mate Nico Hülkenberg into the points). As Piastri points out, “If you wanna drive 10sec off the pace here, you can.” Indeed, the likelihood is you still won’t be passed.

What if, having got your first stop out of the way, you delay your second stop for as long as possible in the hope of catching a safety car or VSC — but then there’s a red flag and the race does not restart? Well, then you get a 30sec penalty for not taking the second stop. What if, immediately before the red flag, there was a safety car so the field was closely bunched? Then that penalty can drop you from the front to dead last.