Here's how I imagine the tyre rules for Australia:
Pirelli says "righto chaps, the compounds available are Supersoft, Soft and Medium"
The teams say "what's that mean?
We call 'em prime and option"
Pirelli says "you know... the red one, the yellow one and the white one... you'll have to call em something like option, prime and optimusprime just to confuse the fans as much as possible"
The fans say "aw, we wanted to see the new pretty purple one
"
Pirelli says "sorry, we're scared it'll explode after half a lap
so we're only using it at a couple of races"
The FIA then says "we've heard some F1 fans think that qualifying should be about cars being the fastest possible, so we insist that one of your 13 sets is the supersoft, and you have to save it for Q3!
"
Pirelli then says "we insist that one of your sets is the Soft and one of the sets is the Medium. You probably should hold onto them, use em if you want in practice or quali, but if you do you're gonna find yourself short of tyres come raceday, so don't come complaining to us
"
The teams then say, "psst, FIA, this is our secret selection of the ten other sets of tyres."
Pirelli then gets to work making those tyres in Turkey. Maurizio says "Bonjourno Pirelli
, would you mind making some tyres that are especially crappy for Mercedes like you did in Singapore?
" But then the FIA throws all the tyres into three giant hats marked "M", "S" and "SS", and picks out each team's selection at random, so Maurizio's villainous plan is foiled. The tyres are loaded onto a boat which sails off to Oz.
During the race buildup the FIA says "ahem, these are tyres that everyone chose.... aren't Haas stooopid for picking 10 sets of the supersoft cos they don't know Pirellis disintegrate, hahaha
"
Then fiiiiiiinally the season kicks off
. After each practice session every driver gives back two sets of tyres from the 10 they chose. Maldonado looks miffed because he has to give back an unused set after crashing into the lake on the first lap.
We get to qualifying. Because it is soooo amazingly close this year with just 0.005 of a second covering the front to back row, every driver will have to use a new set of supersofts to get through each qualifying session. This pisses off Mercedes, as they had assumed they'd blitz the field so had only nominated 10 sets of soft tyres and promptly they get knocked out in Q1
.
We get to Q3. Pirelli says "hey, you guys who suck and didn't make it.... we feel sorry for you
so you can have that set of supersofts you saved for Q3 for the race instead."
The FIA then says, "hey, you guys in Q3, we don't like you
so we're gonna take those supersofts you saved for Q3 off you even though they're flatspotted and pretty much useless for the race now anyway. Also, you're gonna have to use those supersofts you used in Q2 to start the race on."
Vettel says "um... my Q2 set got punctured on the way back to the pits... it definitely wasn't from cutting corners or anything like that
" And then the FIA say, "don't worry Seb, you can swap 'em, as long as the replacement tyres are vaguely the same no one else will notice.
"
Then the FIA reshuffles the grid by giving grid penalties to drivers it doesn't like
.
It's finally race day
. The FIA says "pit stops are fun and Pirelli want to show off their different coloured tyres so you all need to use at least two different compounds in the race.
We don't care which two though."
Then there's a sudden thunder storm, so all those tyre rules end up not mattering and we have 10 laps on wet tyres behind the safety car before the teams decide that it's more fun to red flag the race and have a boat race in the lake instead.
