After a wet qualifying session yesterday, all the drivers had their full allocation of slick tyres for the race. From the beginning the strategies were open: it was going to be either a two or three stop race, with the performance of the soft tyre in the first stint as well as the medium tyre in the second stint holding the key to each driver’s potential. Once it was clear that a slight increase in track temperature today wasn’t going to have a significant effect in terms of graining on the soft tyre, the teams concentrated on the main race tyre: the medium. Temperatures generally throughout this weekend have been low – among the lowest we have seen during a race weekend over the last three years – and as a result we did see some graining on the soft tyre in particular, which also caused a few marbles on the back straight. That’s not something we like to see, but under the circumstances, it was to be expected. Degradation on the medium tyre was less than a tenth of a second per lap here, while degradation on the soft was just over two-tenths of a second.