A few misconceptions
1. "Drivers are now pushing" (and they weren't last year).
No. Drivers are not even close. They are so "relaxed" nowadays that they don't even carry a water bottle in some cases. Cornering is like -1G and speeds can be -30 to -50km/h in fast corners. A driver can't push when he loses grip every time he tries to take a corner (and he's not even attempting to go fast through it). There can be no "pushing" when the tire breaks traction for fun and the driver has to go slow in order to "nurse" the tire to avoid sliding-induced wear (read #2).
2. "Tires are getting worn as they are right now - imagine what would happen with softer compounds"
This year's tires have so little grip that a new type of wear has appeared: sliding-induced wear. In effect, cars are sliding too much (because the tires are too hard) and then due to all this sliding they wear the tires. It's a feedback loop.
3. "This year's tires are great".
Yep, so great that almost all of the teams can't even find any grip with them. 99.99% of the fans don't even realize the effect tires have in this years championship.
The problem with these tires are that they are out of sync with these f1 cars. It's like they are made for a different category of cars (with much more serious aero/mechanical loading). Unless an f1 car has excessive mechanical grip or significant downforce, they won't really be able to make the tires work. The cars that do not fit these criteria are automatically out of the window of tire operation (not only temp wise but also loading-wise).
Note: This is not a case of the best car winning because the did the best job. It's having some cars gain an extra advantage because they are inside the tire operating window when others are not - gaining more time than they deserve based on their car design fundamentals (cog/df/mech. grip/braking power/engine performance/drag/weight etc).
4. Softer compounds = cheese tires
A tire can be soft but have a performance degradation which is linear to tire wear. It is not necessary to have 2x-3x levels of degrading performance compared to wear level.
5. Tire range names
Just because a tire is called supersoft or hard, doesn't mean it is. The names are ALWAYS relative to a specific year's tire range. If in one year the tires are too soft, the "hard" could be softer than the "soft" of another year where the tires are harder.
Edited by Alexandros, 18 May 2014 - 11:13.