Teams face an added problem in Baku: understanding the tyres will be decisive for strategy

When the teams take their cars out of the garages in Baku this Friday, engineers and drivers will have to approach their preparation as if it were a brand-new Grand Prix on the calendar.

The Azerbaijan GP took over in 2017 the legacy of the European GP, the nomadic race that the Formula 1 World Championship had and that Ecclestone “wisely” exploited to collect genuine fortunes from those who aspired to host a Formula 1 Grand Prix in their countries or cities, until last year the first edition was held under the name Azerbaijan GP. A crazy race, with absolutely everything: contact, overtakes, anger, battles, safety cars, penalties, retirements, duels and, throughout the entire race, excitement, lots of excitement.

And this second edition of the race at the Baku circuit promises to repeat that crazy scenario experienced in 2017. The reasons are very simple: the significant change in the characteristics of the tyres introduced by Pirelli for this season is combined with the change of dates for the Grand Prix, the large difference in timings between practice, qualifying and the race, and the constant alternation of shaded and sunlit areas along its layout, as it is an urban circuit. An absolutely decisive circumstance that will raise great unknowns for the race and the performance of the cars from Thursday’s practice sessions through to the end of Sunday’s race.

The strong temperature differences that will result from bringing the Grand Prix forward by almost two months compared with last year’s date will pose a serious problem for the teams when choosing between the different types of tyres that Pirelli makes available to them.

“Baku is an urban circuit, but with very high speeds. It has sectors that are very, very fast, but it also has parts of the track that receive a lot of sun and parts in permanent shade. This means that there will be sections of the track with very different temperatures, and these will also be highly variable,” says Mario Isola, head of Pirelli.

The tyre manufacturer has decided that in Azerbaijan the tyres available for the race will be the soft (yellow), the supersoft (red) and the ultrasoft (purple). “I think that in Baku the ultrasoft will be a less aggressive option compared with Shanghai. The circuit is less abrasive and so is the asphalt. I think the lap time difference between compounds will be around half a second,” Isola declared.

Compared with 2017, the tyre selection is much softer, not only because of the types of tyres chosen, but also because the individual compounds are softer than those used last season. “The Azerbaijan GP will be very different this time, above all because the track exceeded 50ºC last year, and this year the change of dates will pose an important challenge. We felt we were very conservative and the medium compound was never used, so this year we have been more aggressive in our choices,” Isola said.

Furthermore, the time differences between the different sessions of free practice, qualifying and the race will heighten the teams’ doubts when deciding which tyre to fit, since on top of the difficulty of understanding how the tyres behave they must add that of predicting how they will perform during the actual race. Data from previous years will therefore not be valid, by any means, for establishing the race strategies of the different teams, who will have to take all these variables into account in order to achieve good performance and results in the race.

We will have to see, in any case, whether the three tyre changes made during last year’s race are finally the number of stops planned by the teams in their winning strategies or whether they will only use two to shave seconds off the lap time.