A couple of extracts from the excellent analysis that digitalrurouni linked a page back:
The guy(s) at f1metrics took all of Mercedes' stints on mediums, did their best to correct them for fuel and came up with this graph:
It looks too good and there probably is some over-fitting there, but the take home message is that the faster you drive, the faster your tire degrades.
This explains the whole time management going on, if your sting has to last a lot of laps, slow but slow-degrading is actually the fastest way. (I know, I am last to the party).
They used their own fitted model to calculate just how fast your tires will degrade in an 18 lap stint depending on how fast you push (in a W07 on mediums):
And the optimum average lap time comes at a rather low degradation rate, AKA, pushing little, easily 1-2 seconds slower than one could.
They also calculate the optimum level of pushing (degradation) for stints of a certain length:
You have to stop pushing as soon as you expect your stint to be 7 laps long. And this is on mediums. On defence of the Pirellis, this is also Barna, a real tire eater.
Yes, there is data fitting, then modeling, then more data fitting and then some more modeling involved, but the results are rather compelling and they might hold quite a bit of truth in them.
Rivals, not enemies.