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Best
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You do not drive. You decide when to pit — and the safety car decides when it is cheap.
The car laps on its own; the tyres wear a little every lap and worn tyres are slower, with the loss growing sharply near the end of their life. Press the pit button and the car takes fresh tyres at the end of the current lap, at the cost of a large chunk of time in the pit lane. Never stopping is catastrophic because the closing laps crawl, and stopping five times throws the race away in the pit lane, so two stops is the sweet spot over this distance. A safety car appears at random: everyone slows down, but while it is out a pit stop costs only a fraction of the usual time, which makes that window the cheapest place to change tyres. Beat the rival and the next race pairs you with a faster one; the rival keeps getting faster without limit, so the run always ends. Your score is the number of races won.
Think in stints, not in laps. Twenty-six laps split into three stints of roughly nine is close to ideal, and the reason is the shape of the wear curve: the first laps on a set cost you almost nothing, the last ones cost enormously. Two short-ish stints plus a third is cheaper than one long stint even after paying twice in the pit lane, and that is the entire case for stopping.
Once you accept that, the failure modes are obvious. A one-stop run leaves you dragging a set through its worst laps twice over. A five-stop run spends more in the pit lane than the fresh rubber ever gives back. Both lose comfortably to a plain two-stop plan, and neither is a close call.
The safety car is where the game stops being arithmetic. Pitting under it costs roughly a third of the usual, so a stop you were going to make anyway suddenly becomes almost free. The catch is that it rarely arrives at the lap you had planned. Taking it when your tyres have real wear on them is worth about seven points of win rate; taking it on nearly new tyres wastes the stop and is worse than ignoring the car entirely.
When you do take an early window, re-space what is left. A stop on lap six followed by your original plan for lap nine is the classic way to ruin a race — you throw away one stop and then drag a single set through the last seventeen laps. Spread the remaining stops evenly across the laps that remain, and the early window turns into free time instead of a trap.