Horner: Starting on pole is less important this year in F1

According to Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner, this year in F1 starting from pole position is less important at some circuits. The combination of new tires and overtaking aids has made on-track battles and strategies more important.

In the recent Chinese Grand Prix, Mark Webber did not go beyond 18th position in qualifying but in the race he climbed up to third place, helped by the sets of soft tires saved in qualifying, having not taken part in Q2 and Q3.

Horner admitted that Webber's performance prompted the team to rethink its approach to the race weekend.

“What happened puts a question mark on the value of qualifying,” Horner said. “Now the cars can overtake and with such a marked difference between used and new tyres, we will have to re-evaluate at each race how important it is to start from the front. Our strategists will now study how to structure our race weekends."

Each driver has three sets of soft tires and three sets of hard tires available for qualifying and the race. In most races last year the top drivers used all three sets of soft tires in qualifying and ran the first stint on the final set before stopping for hard tyres.

But with this year's Pirelli tires featuring greater degradation, Horner said he was convinced that drivers would be better off saving sets of soft tires at the expense of grid position.

“Depending on the characteristics of the track and tires on each weekend, the strategy could be altered to have new tires in key parts of the race, perhaps to the detriment of qualifying,” he added. “You have to do a lot of overtaking, but Mark has shown that it is possible. With a few more laps he would have won. With two laps less, Sebastian would have won, using a conventional strategy, based on a good grid position."