Yesterday, November 17, Pirelli released a statement informing the Formula 1 world that the 2025 Qatar GP will be affected by a new rule: drivers will be able to use every set of tyres at their disposal (regardless of whether it is Hard, Medium or Soft) for up to 25 laps in total.
There's a lot of talk about tires these days. In recent races we have seen several compound jumps, so when we heard the news, we thought it was a test, promoted by the FIA and Pirelli, to try to find a good solution to the lack of spectacle and overtaking on the track. The agitation jump was well received in Mexico, for example, but poor results were achieved the previous weekend in Austin, Texas.
No tests, at least on paper
Instead, to our surprise, as we continued reading the statement, we learned that this is not an experiment, but rather a precautionary measure to prevent teams from replicating last year's strategies.
This isn't the first time Pirelli and the FIA have implemented countermeasures to strategists' "extravagant" ideas, but… all of this has a strong tone. Bearing in mind that Qatar is a particularly challenging tyre track, this year, as in 2024, Pirelli has decided to bring the hardest compounds available to the track: C1 such as Hard, C2 Medium and C3 Soft.
That the teams pushed the tyres to the limit during the 2024 GP is certainly true, but they did it essentially for one reason: the Media C2 had been the best compound for the race, so they all tried to do as many laps as possible, with the result that the first stint on the yellow compound was extended by most drivers until lap 35°.
A precautionary measure of this kind, let's talk about the rule that will take over in two weeks, from the writer's point of view, would have been more understandable if it had been the Hard C1 that had found itself in difficulty last year. If teams had to stretch their stints on white to make just one pit stop, it would have been a different story, but that wasn't the cause. Last year, the stint on the Media was so long because both C1 and C3 offered a lower level of performance than C2.
For this reason, we believe that if the tires show performance levels similar to those of 2024 again this year, in two weeks we will see strategic choices at the table, most likely of the Medium-Medium-Soft type (there are 57 laps to complete on the Lusail track).
The 2024 result was likely used as a pretext for testing, also because, according to the author, if Pirelli had truly feared that the teams might abuse the Media, it would have been sufficient to limit its use to compound C2 only. Perhaps, even if it were a well-disguised test, the measure is still too precautionary. Forcing teams to make more stops doesn't increase the spectacle, but rather limits it further.
Photo: Pirelli
Read also in italian language: Nuova norma Pirelli in Qatar, la gara 2024 potrebbe essere solo un pretesto
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