Damon nails it! rotflmao

They do, however, need to get the right tyres for each race and ones that go off after only a few laps are a bit farcical.

This is the result of the single tyre supplier.

Bridgestone aren’t happy with just getting to be the sole supplier and they want something else to get people talking about the tyres otherwise the only time we’d talk about them would be when they failed.

Bridgestone was put with their back against the wall. You could think to blame them for opting to keep the compounds and bringing “non successive” compounds rather than redesigning all their components to somehow manufacture a 5 tenths gap (how to do that anyway?).

Then I say, they should simply have rejected this daft idea altogether. Both options were ludicrous.

you can also see it as that the teams and drivers should be more flexible and aware of that they must learn to adapt to different tyre compounds

You can tell them to be flexible by forcing drivers to drive with closed eyes or with a chicken onboard as well

- Lewis, just squeeze the chicken with your thighs. No, it won’t fly away, chickens don’t fly… well especially if you suqeeze them too tightly. But you don’t wanna get minus points for a late chicken, do you?! You gotta be flexible, Lewis!

i think this is a screw up on Bridgestone’s side rather than the FIA’s rules…. but again i stress that i would prefer one type of rubber like the old days.

For example, looking at Vettel’s lap data, his 9th lap of his soft stint at the end was only 1s slower than his fastest lap that stint, which came on the 6th. But his 10th lap was 9/10s slower than the 9th. The 11th lap was when he and Kubica wrecked, but still, the lap time differential at the beginning of that lap was less than 2 seconds. At the start, Massa was 4.4s slower on lap 10 than his fastest, but had he pitted two laps earlier, the differential on lap 8 was only 1.5s.

If the drivers were able to only get 5 or 6 laps in before hitting a 5 second gap, then I’d say it’s too extreme. But so far, I think the balance Bridgestone has struck appears to be healthy. I suppose China’s abrasive surface may throw a wrench into things, but even so, I seem to recall Massa saying after practice that the softs were lasting for about 10 laps, which again, seems close to the ideal to me. I guess I wouldn’t mind if they lasted a few laps longer, but I wouldn’t want it to be very much more.

That’s it for now. Barry

As it also is, there are two different types of tyres no matter what, so ones car can be dialed in to work better with one than the other, and even varying cars and teams will probably profit from one compound more than the other, regardless of which one that is.

Sometimes less than ideal car setups put more emphasis on the skill of the driver.

Read my previous post first. The problem is that those weird rules cause having “less than ideal setups” in some teams to a greater extent than in others.

They introduce more and more factors that make it harder to figure whether a driver’s good/bad performance is due to his skills or a lucky or an unlucky correlation of those factors.

Now imagine that FIA ruled that all teams should use the same front wing. Sounds like making things even, sounds fair, right? For now…
Now, and if the front wing that everybody had to use from now on was McLaren’s wing?
The McLaren’s would be fastest by a long shot – whereas the other teams would struggle with a wing that doesn’t work the way it works on a McLaren, obviously.
You’d have Hamilton winning races, and everybody could say: “Hey, they’ve all got the same wing. So it’s down to the driver’s skill. Lewis is the best!”

But that would obviously be not the truth.
The 2-compound rule works in a similar fashion.
It is just another factor that makes the overal result more car-oriented, BUT this time with a random distribution “good cards” among the teams.

@ ukk
You’re right, and that’s why teams should have the right to choose a tyre compound that suits their cars best.

I also disagree that passes that happen because of the tyre performance difference are meaningless. Artificial, yes; but meaningless, no.

I understand you’re argument.

But I think it becomes increasingly meaningless the bigger the performance difference in the tyres. If someone is a second, 2 seconds a lap slower than you on the soft and you’re on the hard, yeah, you’ve still got to work to pass them.

But when you’re getting to the 5, 6 second gap that we were seeing in Melbourne, it gets silly.

Anyway, remember we were a bit lucky in Melbourne to get a decent race because the Ferraris running the softs had rather blown the field apart with their slow pace and only the intervention of the SC made things close up again. The top 2 were over half a minute ahead of the rest only a few laps in. That sort of thing doesn’t particularly make for good racing.