Switching gears for a sec, I found this about this season and tyres from wise Barichello when asked about the no refueling in the good old days:
Interesting what he found from the tests. Tyre "caring" speculation is starting to look like it won't hold much weight. I think it's down to the car's inherent mechanical design, and if it's in "bad air", that determines when the tyre's performance falls off.I don’t think so. I think that cars were very different [in 1993].
Even though we consider this year that we hve to look after the tyres, in Formula 1 nowadays conserving the tyres is out of the question, you want to go flat out. Testing has been quite intense to try to go flat out all the way though. In ‘93 we were looking after tyres, it was different. I think although it’s only February it’s intense – we’ve been doing 500km, 600km, 700km per day which is not normal.
So I would say it’s different times, the young kids have learned very fast what they need, they’ve been doing starts on high fuel, so I won’t have an advantage at the first race.
Rubens Barrichello