With Pirelli’s choice to bring the softest tires to Azerbaijan this year, there was some hope that they might deviate from the traditional one-stop, all the more so as the time loss in the pit lane is limited compared to some other circuits. However, Pirelli has once again dashed that hope by stating that everyone will probably go for a one-stop.
Looking at the individual drivers’ remaining sets of tires, Pirelli seems to be right. After all, for the drivers who start in the top ten, Pirelli assumes one stint on the soft tires on which they start, and then finish the race on the hard tires. The pit stop window is quite limited. The less long life of the red tires leaves little room to drive much longer than the rest.
Polesitter Charles Leclerc as well as Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen have kept a new set of hard tires on hand. Hamilton even has two more, while Verstappen and Leclerc still have a set of medium tires left. However, Pirelli makes no mention of the possibility of a one-stop where you switch from soft to medium tires (see below).
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The ‘soft-hard’ strategy is therefore obvious for the top three, but in Baku there is a big ‘but’. The chance of a safety car is huge. The chance of a red flag is even life-sized. And if the race is neutralized to a greater or lesser extent and the mutual differences leave room for a ‘free’ pit stop, then the set of medium tires can suddenly be very valuable at a later stage in the race.
It is very possible that Red Bull and Ferrari have bet on that for Verstappen and Leclerc respectively. Smart, but in Monaco we saw that the drivers are all able to avoid a safety car period. And if the strategic advantage doesn’t fall in Verstappen’s way, he can always try to overtake Hamilton and Leclerc on track. In Monaco such a thing might have been almost impossible, in Azerbaijan certainly not.
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