Unlike China, the key to managing the tyres here is going to be thermal degradation, with track temperatures well in excess of 40 degrees centigrade. With all the traction and braking events, this challenges the rear tyres in particular and that will be the limiting factor. The track is evolving all the time so we should see the times getting faster and faster: even though this year’s pole time is already quicker than last year’s pole, which was set on a nominally softer compound. The performance gap between the two compounds is much smaller than it was in China, around 0.6s per lap, which means that there are several different possibilities for strategy – as there isn’t one obvious way to go. This is something that we already saw in qualifying, with teams adopting different approaches in each session. Overtaking is reasonably easy in Bahrain compared to many other tracks, and it’s looking like the hard tyre may be the preferred race tyre here with some teams going for the medium. The problem seen on Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes during free practice was not the result of a structural tyre failure, but instead must have been down to a piece of debris on the track.