Pirelli: ‘The soft is quite an aggressive choice’

Last year there was very little grip on the Istanbul Park circuit, so Pirelli decided to bring softer tyres this year. What happened on Friday? There was actually quite a lot of grip, which brought the wear of the softs to a relatively high level. The fact that there is more grip has everything to do with the fact that the Turkish asphalt was recently waterblasted.

Pirelli, however, did not know about this: "Usually we are informed by the FIA if there is any change in tarmac, or if the circuit decides to resurface, or make any special treatment. In that case, probably it was a late decision from the promoter, I suspect," concludes Mario Isola to Motorsport.com.

Either way, it looks like we're going to see mostly the other two tyre types back on Sunday. "The soft is quite an aggressive choice. And I believe that some teams were using the soft today just to get rid of them, and focus on the medium and hard for the race." A one-stop seems most likely based on the data from the first day in Turkey.

Lots of mediums in Q2?

So presumably the F1 drivers will not want to start the race on softs. That also has implications for the strategy in Q2 during qualifying, especially since the difference between the softs and mediums is only three or four tenths. "I believe that we will see more than two or three cars trying to qualify on the soft, because the delta lap time between the soft and the medium is very small."