Bringing back tyre competition, without the drawbacks
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Although opinions are divided, the artificial limitations of the current tyres ruin a racing series that claims to be the pinnacle of motor sports. To add insult to injury, they introduced rule that would force the teams to use different compounds for no developmental reason whatsoever.
With some manufacturers only interested in competition, I figured, why not allow competition to come back and force all the teams to use a tyre supplied by each manufacturer instead?
Michelin picks what they think offers the best performance for a weekend, as does Pirelli and all teams are obliged to use both types during a race. Both speed as well as longevity are tested each weekend, pushing the actual quality of the product and promoting harder racing. Since all the teams would be forced to use both, competition would be transparent and could not favour any one team.
Restrictions in weight, production techniques or materials used could be used to make it difficult for all manufacturers, but within those limits they should be free to focus on quality, rather than a deliberate lack thereof.
The mandatory pitstop would work for every type of tyre (dry, wet, intermediate), but can be ignored when switching to a type not previously used in the same race (Pirelli dry -> Pirelli intermediate).
This would keep attention on tyres, promote productive competition and at least makes some real world sense to viewers.
It’s a novel piece of lateral thinking but I think it’s unrealistic. The tyre manufacturers would be too concerned about transfer of information about their products to their rivals via the teams. That would probably make it a non-starter.
It’s not unheard of for a team to use multiple makes of tyre in one race weekend – it happened on occasion in the early eighties when there were several rows over tyres. But this wasn’t by design: it was because some teams didn’t have a contract with a tyre supplier and had to use customer tyres or even tyres left over from earlier races.
So to me the idea of one or all the teams getting development tyres from more than one tyre manufacturer seems unlikely.
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