Although Pirelli has gone a step softer in its tyre allocation for Azerbaijan this year, in the hope of steering teams away from defaulting to a one-stop strategy, actually this has had the opposite effect.
The C5 which was the unfancied soft last year is now the medium, with the new C6 becoming the softest option. But since the difference in lap time between the two compounds is so small – in the order of two tenths of a second – many teams opted to run the mediums in qualifying.
But the qualifying session itself was disrupted by rain and gusting winds, provoking crashes which induced a record six red flags. As a result, several drivers are out of position on the grid – championship frontrunners Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris are ninth and seventh, while the Williams and Racing Bulls cars of Carlos Sainz and Liam Lawson are second and third.
As a result of the disruption, many drivers didn’t complete as many push laps as they normally would. So the picture of ‘new’ and ‘used’ sets is muddier than it would otherwise be: a ‘used’ set might have only collected a couple of heat cycles ahead of push laps which were then aborted because of red or yellow flags.
And even though the C5 was generally shunned last year, it will likely form the backbone of most one-stop strategies this time. Pirelli has adjusted its compounds in response to driver feedback and they are less prone to thermal degradation now.
Despite being alongside the fastest straight on the F1 calendar, the pits don’t incur as much expense as you might expect in terms of lap time: just under 20 seconds.
The queue to leave the pitlane during practice
Photo by: Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images
What dictates a one-stop strategy here is the importance of track position. After Turn 1 the possibility of overtaking rapidly declines – if the driver ahead makes a mistake into Turn 1, you could take a punt into Turns 2 or 3, but history shows this carries huge risks.
Essentially this track is a 4km game of follow-my-leader before you get to the main straight. And as Monza proved, the rear wings on these cars are now so drag-efficient in their normal state that the DRS effect is less powerful.
All this feeds into a one-stop being the route-one choice, but the high probability of incidents on this track means teams still have an incentive to keep a broader stock of tyres.
“A one-stop strategy is still the quickest on paper, starting on the medium and then moving to the hard,” said Pirelli motorsport manager Mario Isola in his post-qualifying briefing. “For someone starting from the back it could be the opposite, hard-medium.
“We know that here the safety car, virtual safety car probability is very high. And that’s probably the reason they wanted to keep many mediums and hard available for Sunday.
“All the top teams, top drivers have two sets of hard and two or three sets of medium. There are plenty of tyres compared to a usual situation.
“Another point is that they have used the medium on more laps than expected. Usually you have a couple of runs, one run you change the tyre, another run. While with all the red flags we have used the mediums.
Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images
“We saw a very good grip recovery, both from the medium and from the soft. So if they decide to start on a used medium, the disadvantage is not huge, even if the medium has six laps [on it already]. The space between the grid and the first corner is very short, so you don’t have a real big advantage at the start.”
Pirelli’s expectation is that the theoretically faster medium-hard strategy will play out with a pit window between laps 16-22. For hard-medium – a possibility for those at the back of the grid to make a play for track position – the window is likely to fall between laps 29 and 35.
But there is a third possibility on the table: soft-hard, with an earlier pit window between laps 10 and 16. Ordinarily this might seem preposterously risky on a track like this, but there are mitigating circumstances.
Firstly, it has rained overnight in Baku so the track is likely to be ‘green’. Only Formula 2 is on the support card ahead of the grand prix, so the grip levels on track will evolve during the race.
Secondly, the ambient temperatures continue to be way down compared with last year. Some teams – by no means all – found the C6 tyre worked better than expected in these conditions, both in terms of outright grip and longevity.
Many of those who came into qualifying with the preconception that the medium would be definitively the better tyre, on account of being more familiar and predictable, found that it was harder to prepare. The C6 fired up quicker but required more sympathetic treatment to maintain peak performance on both axles over the course of a push lap.
Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari
Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images
Hence the peculiar scenario of Lewis Hamilton bemoaning the fact that he was on softs at the crucial moment in Q2 when he thought he should have been on mediums, while his team-mate Charles Leclerc was on the mediums – and wished he’d been on softs. Leclerc pointedly used the word “digital” to describe the grip on the mediums in these conditions: either on or off.
“I am expecting again a lot of track evolution,” said Isola. “And also if it is cold, why not? Maybe someone could try to use the soft because it was performing quite well in cold conditions. So that’s also a possibility…”
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