[Matth]

A brief history of tyres:

Back in the good old days, there were qualifying tyres, super soft, super sticky, and they only had one good lap before they were gone - the team with the best qualifying tyre performance qualified high, but could be well out of place compared to race performance.

With the end of those, and to avoid softs being turned back into qualifiers, teams then had to qualify and race on the same grade of tyres - not sure if they could still run soft and a hard tyre on the corner with the most wear (in some earlier rules, teams could and did). Another thing from the good old days was hand-grooved soft slicks, when the intermediates were rubbish.

Another set of rules that didn't last very long, was the no tyre change rules, with one set per race, change without penalty permitted only if there was a puncture or other unexpected damage.

What was wrong with the old "choose the right tyres", as opposed to "choose the right time to run the wrong tyres".

You know what I'd like to see back? the good old "Quali Hour", but with just one change, a "use them or lose them" countdown of laps with time, to force some action throughout the hour - eg. Start with a maximum of 15 laps, rather than the old 12, but lose 1 from that maximum every 5 minutes.