Safety Car & Virtual Safety Car
VerifiedThe two ways race control slows the whole field down after an incident, one behind a physical car and one on a virtual pace limit.
A Safety Car comes out after a serious incident or heavy debris on track. It leads the whole field around at reduced speed, bunches the cars up nose to tail behind it, and holds them there until it's safe for racing to resume.
A Virtual Safety Car does the same job without a physical car on track. Instead, every driver is shown a pace they must not beat through each marshalling sector, which forces a set slower lap, then the VSC ends and the race resumes at full speed.
Both slow the whole field together, so the usual pace cost of pitting shrinks: everyone is running slowly anyway, which makes a stop far cheaper than it would be at racing speed. That's why so many strategy calls change the moment one comes out.