Well to be fair, they were slightly forced into that too-early soft pitstop by Schumi off-roading it and picking up a front-puncture.Ganxxta wrote:... so MS did 12 and 19 lap stints on the hard tyres and 37(!) laps on softs One has to be no super intelligent Ross Brawn to see that the last stint wouldn't work, another stop and the times that Kubica drove on softs at the end was the solution.
Still 37 laps was over-optimistic, but none of the top teams had spare new tyres available by then, so whether taking an extra stop to fit a set of very used hards for a few laps was going to be much quicker than struggling home on softs probably wasn't clear at the time.
Either way, between that, and Webber getting stuck between a rock and a hard place, losing pace too early, but only having options to switch to, meaning you can't pull the trigger on the switch-over (or end up like Schumacher) I think we might have seen the end of anyone qualifying on hards.
Sure no-one quite expected the ferocious prime degradation on full-tanks, but track position this year is 9/10ths of the law, so giving up grid-slots, and then losing raceday flexibility seems like a double-whammy. I reckon it's soft-then-hard all the way home from now on.
Which would be a shame, I kinda like races where I have no idea what is happening.