20/09/2021
NEWS STORY
As the debate over ways of spicing up the Sunday action continues, Pirelli's Mario Isola admit that F1 bosses want to keep things simple.
Ironically, his comment comes at a time the likes of Tot Wolff have questioned the complexity of Sprint weekends.
In terms of spicing things up and introducing variety, in recent years much of the focus has been on tyres.
The days of drys (slicks) and wets a distant memory, over the years we have seen all manner of combinations before the sport finally settled on hard, medium and soft, but even then one weekend's hard can be the equivalent of following weekend's medium.
If one positive thing has come out of the Sprint weekends it is the uncertainty when drivers are given free choice for the race, however, thus far F1 bosses have made little of this.
Asked if the sport has given any consideration to drivers being forced to use all three compounds on race day, Pirelli's Mario Isola says that such a move would see the teams using similar strategies.
"It was discussed a couple of years ago and the conclusion was that forcing the drivers to use the three compounds, the result can be that everybody is just converging on the same strategy.
"Any time that you give more constraint, you have everybody doing the same," he added, "that is not in the spirit of what we want to achieve.
"It means a mix of one and two-stop strategies using the three different compounds and so on and so on, not having everybody stopping at the same lap and changing the tyres using the same sequence of compounds.
"That's why the idea was abandoned a couple of years ago," he admitted. "Obviously it is something we can discuss for the future - but I believe that, as I said, we need a regulation that is easy to understand also for spectators. Obviously encouraging different strategies but not making too much complicated with a lot of different constraints and so on, and so on. That's probably the target for the future."
Fact is, for the most part the strategies are pretty similar anyway, and while some teams may opt to undercut or overcut, the opposition usually reacts within a lap or two.
Even so, fans want to see races decided on track, possibly by hard-battling and overtakes, as opposed to strategy calls over tyres.
Of course, another option would be to introduce some additional tyre suppliers.