McLaren has stopped the chances of frontrunning teams qualifying in Turkey to save all-new tyres for the f1 race.
With this weeks race in Istanbul likely to see higher levels of tyre degradation, there have been some opinions that drivers may choose to not run in parts of qualifying so they can save theirtyres for the real thing.
“The tyre degradation is going to be large factor in Turkey, and I think that will certainly be pending towards a three-stop race,” explained Prew.
“There are some benefits of having new tyres available to you. However, I think the competitiveness of the field will force you pretty much to run your ultimate new tyres through qualifying.
“Our position would always be to take qualifying position over the new tyres in the race. I am not discounting what we did with Lewis in China, but we were fortunate to get through Q1 and Q2 with a single set of option tyres, which allowed us to save one set of options. But I don’t think not competing in Q3 for tyre saving is the right thing to do.”
“There have been continual improvements in pretty much all areas, from the lessons learned through winter testing and the early races, as well as continued work to improve our tyre utilisation.”
“But as we have seen over the first three races, the difference between cars varies from track to track. Turkey should be a reasonably strong track for us, and developments deliver performance if we utilise performance.
“We are also conscious everyone else is aiming to improve the car at the same time. As always we hope we have done enough and more than other people.”
