Red Bull team principal Christian Horner believes Mark Webber’s charge from 18th to 3rd in China, has signalled a change to how teams will think about qualifying.
The Australian was knocked out in Q1 after showing poor pace and only running the harder compound, which is estimated to be a second slower than the soft tyre.
Despite starting the race in 18th, and failing to make up places in his first stint on hards, he sailed through the field when he switched to new soft tyres, whilst others were using the hard compound.
Horner believes Webber’s performance has devalued the need to be on pole position to win a race.
“It makes you question the value of qualifying,” He told the Sunday Times. “Now the cars can overtake and with such a big difference between old and new tyres, we are going to have to reassess at each track how important it is to get to the front of the grid.
“Our strategists will look at how we should be structuring our race weekends.”
With tyres being such a key component this season, sacrificing qualifying runs to save a set of soft tyres, as Lewis Hamilton did, could be vital to a competitive race strategy.
“According to the characteristics of the track and the tyres at any given weekend, you might want to tilt the whole thing in favour of having fast, new tyres at key parts of the race, maybe at the expense of qualifying,” he added.
“You have to do a lot of overtaking to make it work, but Mark showed it can be done. You could say he needed a couple more laps to have won. With two laps less we could have won with Sebastian, using a conventional strategy, based on good grid position.”
