Mark Hughes: Tyre-wrecking Sepang could produce an F1 upset

Sepang’s surface was always pretty coarse back in the day, which, combined with plenty of long-duration fast corners, meant huge tyre degradation – and, crucially, a much bigger difference than usual between cars which could keep that degradation under control and those which could not. Well, it’s even more coarse now, nine years after F1 last visited and the early signs in practice today took us back to the 2010s as drivers suddenly realised just how quickly their grip was disappearing.

In terms of headline pace, Red Bull and Mercedes continued where they’d left off at the front in Baku last week. But within a few laps of running, both were up to 8sec slower than just a few laps earlier. “I’ve got nothing at the front,” radioed in Isack Hadjar after a handful of laps on the soft compound tyre. “Zero.” He wasn’t alone.

It’s early days yet, and things are bound to improve through the weekend, but getting the equation right between soft, medium and hard, of working out which should be your favoured compound, and how few stops that might allow you to make, is going to be the key to success this weekend. And there could be a lot of variation. Because the scatter of performance is potentially so great when the tyres are so on the edge. Also, the allocation of just two hard sets and three mediums for the whole weekend opens the door for a strategically disastrous choice of which tyres you use up in trying to establish what the favoured compound is!

Optimising the strategy is not only going to be about how long you can make each compound last when the thermal degradation is so high, but which is your fastest compound over a stint. The differences here being so much greater than normal potentially allows even cars which are off the pace in qualifying to be contenders on race day.

For a good case study, we can look at the 2015 race here. Early in the second year of the then-new hybrid regulations, the Mercedes was still clearly the fastest car and would go on to dominate the championship. But on that weekend, neither pole-sitter Lewis Hamilton nor his team-mate Nico Rosberg could get the medium tyre to be as fast as the hard over a stint.

The challenge was getting both compounds to work and it’s likely to be the same this weekend; the hard has a higher working temperature range than the medium. Get it to work and you tend to overheat the medium. Tune the set-up around the mediums and you tend to grain the hards. Back in 2015 the Ferrari was by far the best at balancing this compromise and Sebastian Vettel was finding it easy enough on its tyres that he could exploit the medium’s greater performance even over a stint.