That’s certainly how it looked after wet weather voided the strict tyre usage rules in the Saturday shootout and allowed everyone to use whatever slick compound they wanted to over the three sessions.
That led to some frantic laps as drivers worked their way through the soft tyres that they had access to. But there was the unusual sight of Nico Hulkenberg using new mediums in SQ3 to secure fourth on the sprint grid as others scrambled around on second-hand softs.
The whole spectacle suggested that consideration should be given to the accidental format that F1 stumbled across in Austria being applied at the season’s remaining sprints, possibly even starting in Spa at the end of this month.
To recap, when the rules for the standalone sprint Saturday were formulated ahead of Azerbaijan, how tyres were to be used over the weekend was one of the main talking points between the FIA, the teams and Pirelli. The bottom line was that the previously largely redundant FP2 session was being replaced with a three-part qualifying session, which meant an extra demand for new soft tyres.
"The discussion started in Baku, because it was decided to change to this new format quite late and we already delivered the tyres to Baku," says Pirelli F1 boss Mario Isola. “We had an allocation that was already defined. That was the one for the sprint event. When we had this discussion, I said the tyres are already there, or they are arriving at the circuit. So we need the time to react to if you want to modify the breakdown of the compounds.
“And so during a sporting committee we had a discussion on that. And we said let's try to imagine how to do the race weekend, with the allocation that is already defined. And obviously you have more sets of mediums compared to what you have of the soft compound in a standard race. In a standard race, you have eight sets of soft, in the sprint event you have six.
“The idea was if I use one set of soft in free practice, then I have only five. I need three or four for the normal qualifying, or five if you need two for Q2, and then you run out of tyres for the sprint shootout.”
Source: Autosport