You pick a wing level on Friday with information that is not good enough

Limited running and a weather forecast that changes twice force one of the largest setup decisions of the weekend into the worst possible slot.

Rear wing level is close to irreversible in practice. Change it and the whole balance moves, the ride heights want revisiting, the brake bias is wrong, and you have burned a session confirming what you already suspected. So it gets chosen early, on Friday, using data from a track that has not rubbered in, in weather that will not be the weather on Sunday.

That is a structurally bad decision process and it is nobody's fault. It follows from short sessions and the fact that aerodynamic choices interact with everything else.

Watch what happens when the forecast shifts. A team that chose a low-drag configuration expecting a hot, slippery race now faces a cool afternoon where the tyre needs load to reach temperature. Their car will not switch on. They cannot fix it with wing because the wing choice is locked in practice by the way the weekend is structured, so instead they chase it with tyre pressures and mechanical setup, tools that are far too small for the size of the problem.

The uncomfortable part is that the correct choice is often not the fastest one. If the low-drag setup is a tenth quicker in the expected conditions and hopeless if the temperature drops five degrees, while the higher-load setup is a tenth slower and works in both, the second is the better decision even though it loses on Saturday. Teams under pressure rarely pick it, because qualifying position is a number the world can see and surviving a change in the weather is not.

I would rather see teams treat wing level as a hedge than as an optimisation. Ask which choice has the least bad worst case, not which has the best best case.

There is an added wrinkle around overtaking. A car that qualifies fifth with a big wing and cannot pass anybody has optimised for the wrong session. A car that qualifies eighth and slices through the midfield has optimised well. The right answer depends on where you expect to start, which you do not know when you make the choice.

So the decision is made under uncertainty, early, with consequences that last three days, by people who will be judged on it publicly.

Then somebody on television calls it a setup error.

It was a bet. Bets lose sometimes.