Qualifying - German GP report: Pirelli

Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg has claimed pole position for the German Grand Prix. Conditions remained warm and dry throughout the session, with track temperatures of 38 degrees centigrade at the mid-point of qualifying. Rosberg’s pole time of 1m14.363s was more than two seconds faster than the 2014 pole (1m16.540s).

The Mercedes drivers were the only ones to get through Q1 using the soft tyre only, while all the others fitted the supersoft – reckoned to be around 1.5 seconds faster on the German track. From Q2 onwards, all the drivers utilised just the supersoft tyres in qualifying and this is the compound that the top 10 will start on tomorrow. Although yesterday 1.5 seconds separated the soft and supersoft compounds, the gap today seemed to be reduced at around 1 second.

Paul Hembery, Pirelli motorsport director: “It looks like we might be seeing a mixture of two and three stop strategies tomorrow, with the running up to now showing that there could be a few quite different approaches to the race. A lot will obviously depend on the weather, which still appears to be changeable. Mercedes handed themselves a potential advantage by saving themselves an additional set of supersofts, so it will be interesting to see if they can capitalise upon that tomorrow.”

Pirelli recommends that the following numbers of laps are not exceeded on each compound:
— Soft = 29 laps
— Supersoft = 22 laps

On this basis, the optimal pit-stop strategies predicted by Pirelli are as follows:

QUICKEST

Three-stopper: three stints on supersoft + one stint on soft

SECOND-QUICKEST

Two-stopper: two stints on supersoft + one stint on soft (maximizing the stints on supersoft)

THIRD QUICKEST

Two-stopper: two stints on supersoft + one stint on soft (maximizing the single stint on soft)

SLOWEST

Two-stopper: one stint on supersoft + two stints on soft

Different permutations of compound usage within each strategy are possible.

*This information is provided just as an indication for media, based on Pirelli data. It doesn’t form any type of guarantee for the teams, as each team is obviously responsible for choosing its own race strategy based on its own wear data.