For the sixth time this season (out of eight races), Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari will start from pole position. The qualifying held yesterday on the Baku street circuit nevertheless reserved some surprises: Sergio Perez and not Max Verstappen will start alongside Charles from the second place. The Mexican, after the great race in Monte Carlo, managed again to beat his teammate, the reigning world champion who will start from third place ahead of Carlos Sainz’s other Ferrari.
The behavior of the Soft tires is also surprising. If in Q3 the drivers used only new tyres, it must be said that in Q2 it was possible to see rather particular strategies, with Ferrari able to pass the cut by using used compounds in the previous session of Q1 (very competitive times between ‘other). Something that seemed impossible on Friday with the C5 compounds that looked unable to guarantee more than one fastest lap in qualifying simulation. The track has undergone a rather important evolution between the two days and this has certainly helped the drivers in managing the tires, already managing to implement various strategies in qualifying.
It will take 51 laps of the Baku circuit to see the checkered flag of the Azerbaijan GP. Under normal circumstances the fastest strategy would surely be one stop: medium-hard, the most conservative strategy to guarantee greater flexibility in choosing the right moment for the pit stop and Soft-Hard, certainly a riskier option which, on the one hand, will guarantee greater initial speed, will oblige the drivers to return to the pits ahead of the competition that will start on the mediums.
The element that constitutes the greatest unknown will be the risk of intervention by the Safety Car. The safety car could create havoc by forcing teams to change their strategic plans during the race. Pirelli does not recommend the two-stop strategy, which is much slower.
Mario Isola: Making one stop is the most obvious strategy”
These are the comments made by the motorsport director to the official website of Pirelli: “The teams have chosen to use soft rubber from the beginning to the end of qualifying on a track that has always continued to show a certain degree of evolution. A very common strategy is to alternate fast laps with cooling laps with the same set of tires”.
“The soft tire was used a lot in FP3, a session held at the same time as the race. This suggests that the teams can give it a leading role even during the Grand Prix. There are several options available to teams, but one stop seems to be the most obvious, at least on paper. Many teams have kept two sets of Hard tires for the race, perhaps thinking about the possibility of red flags or other interruptions.” – concluded Mario Isola.
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No rain risk forecast for today. The only “dangers” regarding red flags, interruptions and Safety Car periods will therefore be given by the layout of the track and the skill of the drivers who must try to avoid in any way to end their GP with the car against the barriers.
For the Azerbaijan event, Pirelli has decided to use the softest compounds of its range: C3 Hard, C4 Medium and C5 Soft. The red tire had already shown a good behavior on Friday (when Charles Leclerc had managed to keep the Soft alive for almost 20 laps without showing signs of a significant decline in performance), when it was believed that he could not guarantee more than one fastest lap for the drivers during qualifying. However, the evolution of the asphalt has helped the drivers a lot in this regard, creating a diversification of strategies already in Q2.
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