I don't like the idea of teams choosing tyres ahead of the race. It leaves too large a possibility for teams to luck out and pick the wrong tyres, and suffer the entire weekend.
I don't think it'd be that much of a problem. For a start, there could be a rule that a team has to take at least 4 tyres (a set) of 2 different compounds. So if one compound's extremely more competitive than the others they'd at least have the chance to use it once, or the compound closest to it. Then you'd increase the allocation of tyres per team, so they have a bit more of playing room. Okay it'd be slightly more expensive but what's the cost of a few more tyres, this is F1 not a trip to the local karting track with your mates.
Choice of tyres won't be super different from team to team anyway. I really like this idea and would love to see it in reality, basically completely opening up tyre strategies to the will of the teams rather than controlling it obsessively, but I don't think we'd see many different strategies anyway, the optimal strategy tends to be the optimal for everyone no matter what you do. That being said, the current rules were supposedly all about making people use alternate strategies and we're not getting them anyway, so why not open it up instead of these contrived nonsense rules.
But ideally for all of this to work you'd want tyres with considerably different characteristics than the ones we have now. Otherwise people will just go for the hardest tyre every time as the others melt. Fair play to Pirelli for doing what they were told and trying to spice up the races at the cost of PR, but it doesn't really work very well as there's drawbacks to the spectacle with this kind of racing anyway. Ideally what I'd want is:
- a HARD tyre that will typically last a full race in benign conditions (low wear track/temps) if you nurture it a bit. Probably will still force you into a pitstop in most other races no matter what you do.
- a MEDIUM tyre that will typically last 80% of a race in benign conditions if you nurture it, maybe 50% if you push everything every lap, and is a bit quicker than the hard
- a SOFT tyre that will last 50% of a race if you nurture it in benign conditions, 30% if you push everything, and is a bit quicker than the medium. Will absolutely melt if you use it in a race in harsh conditions.
And maybe add a 4th compound in between them somewhere. Plus rain and intermediates, of course. The problem at the moment is that, with a compound that lasts 50% if you nurture it, for example, it'll only last 5% if you push... So in most cases you have no other option but to nurture at all times...
If that's the price to pay for trying to control the compound choices so restrictively every race, it'd be far better to open up things instead and design tyres differently, more for performance and less for degradation on purpose. You won't always be able to manufacture the "desired" amount of pitstops for a race, true, but for the loss of entertainment control you gain a sense of the cars being at the limit in the races. There should naturally be a healthy amount of entertainment anyway.