Spa scorcher could leave Ferrari with tyre headache

With the temperatures at Spa-Francorchamps forecast to be around 30C on Friday and Saturday, with a slight dip for race day, the likelihood is that tyre wear at F1's most punishing of circuits will be much higher than could have been envisaged.

The state of affairs could mean that the supersoft tyre – which may have proved to be a good tyre in the more typical cooler conditions – may not even be ideal for qualifying and could be pretty useless for the race.

As Daniel Ricciardo said: “The supersoft is going to be interesting! The soft and medium will be okay, but the supersoft – we will see if it lasts a lap. We might have to manage it around the lap so let's see.”

If the supersoft proves no good for the race then those teams that have gone aggressive on their choices and picked a lot of them could find themselves low on the better harder rubber.

A host of teams have gone as far as picking seven sets of supersofts for the weekend, but only Ferrari, Sauber and Haas have elected to shy away from the medium tyre.

Ferrari and Sauber's drivers only have one medium tyre each – while Haas has at least given Romain Grosjean an extra set to play with so he should be able to run it in practice at some point to find out how it stacks up.

These three outfits will be hoping that the tyre wear is not so great that even the soft proves too aggressive for the race and that the ideal race tyre becomes the medium.

Even if it does not get that far, the teams will be mindful of not burning through too many of their softs in practice either to find out what is needed.

Either way, if the high temperature makes things harder for the tyres, this trio may go in to Sunday knowing they are well on the back foot - and without having been able to get much data in the bank to find out how things really stack up.

Q2 key

Jenson Button believes the key to the weekend will be in understanding whether the soft or the supersoft is the best tyre for qualifying – and whether or not the front-running teams have enough potential advantage to get through Q2 without needing the supersoft.

“I think there will be quite a few people comparing the soft and the supersoft to see which one is quicker over a full lap,” he explained. “If it is a 30-degrees ambient, 50-degrees on track, will the supersoft do a full lap?

“At a lot of circuits it wouldn't do a lap and a half, which is about 7km, so it will be interesting to see which one is quicker over a lap.

“I think you will see a lot of the quick cars doing soft in Q2. It is strange how it works – the quicker cars take a benefit from being quick enough to run the soft in Q2 so don't have to run the super soft in the race.

“There is a bigger gap than there should be – and there probably will be in the race.”