But still, bringing one set of them is stupid. You cannot test the setup on them at all. I get that they're not the preferred race tyre, but if he has an incident in the first 5-10 laps and wants to pit early and go to the end then the team needs to know how the tyre will react. This is why Ferrari screwed the pooch completely in Monza.
See so many people saying this. If the car isn't tearing up the softest compound and is fast then it's already the correct setup for the hardest compound. That's simply how it is, testing is to make sure the car feels comfortable and has decent tire setup for the race and then about getting it optimised for the last run in Q3, nothing more or less. If you can do X laps on the softer tire in a race sim then testing the harder compound is basically a waste. Q3 laps come from the extreme margins, the extra qualifying runs that let you find that one corner you can make up 1/10th on.
Monza did not get screwed from tire strategy at all, it did not get screwed from not testing the soft.
Kimi is a slower race pace driver than vettel and certainly Hamilton. Hamilton + Merc was faster than Ferrari + Kimi, Kimi pushed harder to make a gap and in doing so blistered his tires, nothing more or less. If Kimi didn't push, Hamilton had him. If they tested 3 sets of softs in free practice, nothing would have changed in the race... except that they may have qualified 2nd and 3rd and behind Hamilton from the start.
Look at Austria, Ricciardo and Verstappen pitted at the same time, Ricciardo burned out his tires, Verstappen went to the end and won on the same tires with the same information before the race. Kimi burned out the tires because he drove too aggressively if he put the tires on 20 laps later or if he did all the testing in the world, he pushed that pace to stay ahead of Hamilton, if he didn't push that pace he wouldn't have been ahead of Hamilton anyway.
