Tyre performance is the single biggest contributor to lap time. There I said it, might be wrong but I'm for one quite glad we no longer have more than one supplier to the teams. I mean who wants to tune in to just find out whether bridgestone or michelin are going to make better compounds this year, wow.
OK so if we accept that tyres are quite important , would the best F1 car be the car that can easily be changed to suit track conditions and get its tyres to the desired temp? Am I conflating tyre temperature and tyre performance? Rob Smedley said in the post race interview smooze that the improvement of the Ferrari in the race as compared to qualifying was all down to getting a bit more heat in to the tyres on race day. 'What are we talking about here, a few degrees...' (DC) 'yes a couple of degrees makes all the difference' (RS). OK that bit was paraphrased but I remember the discussion. Rob Smedley also mentioned the aggressive slip angle they 'need' to run on the Ferrari to generate grip but I don't know if this is a design choice or a necessity.
but wait a minute... what about the drivers. They must have some influence on tyre temp. Are the best drivers those that can modify their style to manage their tyres? We all laughed at Richard Hammond (Top Gear BBC for those that aren't lucky enough to see this glorious waste of the licence fee) when he couldn't get the R25 to go round the corners because he wasn't driving the car fast enough to get the tyres up to temp. Its a vicious circle, not enough tyre temp->no grip->no speed->no tyre temp. Are all F1 drivers on this knife edge only the margins are so small that we can't appreciate it from our comfy armchairs?
If tyre temperature is the only thing that matters, then is a designer's focus about making a car that can be easily tuned to track conditions or do they just make it and let the trackside engineers worry about dialing the car in to the track (hopefully that means what I think it means [-o< ).