Mercedes technical chief Paddy Lowe says the entertaining Australian Grand Prix was made possible by the new Pirelli tyre regulations for 2016.
In a change from last year, Pirelli now brings three compounds to a race instead of two, with the medium, soft and super-soft taken to Australia. Out of the 13 available to drivers, Pirelli sets aside one of each compound (the softest for qualifying, the other two for the race), with teams able to select the other ten sets themselves. As with the old rules, drivers must use two of the available three compounds during a race.
This meant in Australia there was a bigger range in choice for strategists, especially when the race was effectively reset by a red flag on lap 18. Nine drivers -- including race-winner Nico Rosberg -- used all three compounds available and Lowe says the excitement caused was the original intention of the rule change.
"Having three compounds in the race, which was a change we promoted from the middle of last year as being something that would add uncertainty and excitement to the race, I think we've seen that play out really well," Lowe told Fox Sports. "You've got somebody on an old medium, and someone else on a brand new super-soft. It's fantastic.
"We've also pushed the spectacle of qualifying up, because we're effectively a compound softer for qualifying. As we saw on Saturday we were 2.5 seconds quicker, some of that's development, some of that's the tyre."
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After the race Mercedes credited its win with the amount of medium tyre running it did over winter, giving it much more data on that compound compared to Ferrari. Lowe has explained that decision and said it comes down to how much mileage it hoped to accumulate.
"It was simply mileage. We had a target to do 6000 kilometers, on a medium you can get about 100 kilometers, on a soft you get about 30 kilometers. With the fixed quota we were given, we had to take all mediums, apart from four sets of softs and three sets of wets. We'd rather have had more tyres from Pirelli, and then we would have added a lot more softs into the mix."