I ' ll try to anwser this the best I can 1 . The tyres all have a very small and specific temperature window . Too cold and you don ' t have any grip , too hot and you might experience blistering and quick degradation . The difficult job teams have is to have a setup that keeps tyres in this window . Extreme temperatures can make this job very tricky . Yes it can certainly be that certain compounds work better when it is hot . I remember the race in Baku , where Red Bull couldn ' t get the soft and supersoft to work at all . Their tyres overheated and they had pretty extreme degradation , so they opted to go for the medium in the last stint , suddenly they had decent pace . 2 . Essentially yes . Teams value information , with similar weather conditionstemperatures to qualifying and the race most . 3 . Yes to a certain extent . Both longrun pace as well as short run pace can be indicitive . Both types of data can be found on the FIA website I believe . However , some teams Mercedes run their engine pretty conservatively , so they are often better in qualifying and the race than they seem in practice . We also don ' t know the fuel levels , so Mercedes might run heavy fuel leading to a slower lap time . FP can generally show whether it will be relatively close or not close at all , but these results should be taken with a grain of salt . 4 . Probably not . I believe Red Bull has been quickest in fp 3 a number of times , yet they have had pole position only once this season . Mercedes generally runs conservative in FP , so i don ' t expect qualifying to be this close . 5 . FP 2 is generally used by teams to look at the race pace , whilst fp 3 is generally used for qualifying practice .