Ferrari and Mercedes opt for identical tyres at Baku

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The top two teams in the 2017 Formula One world championship have made identical tyre selections for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Pirelli is offering teams a slightly harder line-up of compounds for Baku compared to those run at Monaco and Montreal. Teams have to take one set each of medium, soft and supersoft tyres but after that they decide how to divide up the rest of their 13-set allocation.

Lewis Hamilton, Valtteri Bottas, Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen have all decided that the medium tyre is essentially redundant. Instead, they will all take four sets of soft tyres and then max out the rest of their allowance with eight supersoft tyres.

The same decision has also been made by Haas and Renault, and also by Williams driver Lance Stroll.

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Stroll's team mate Felipe Massa has decided to take two medium tyres, making up the rest with three soft and eight supersofts. That's the same proportion as Red Bull drivers Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen. It's also the decision of Sauber's Marcus Ericsson.

His team mate Pascal Wehrlein has been a little more aggressive. The young German is opting for one set of mediums, three of soft compounds, and nine supersofts. That matches the combined judgement of Force India and Toro Rosso for all four of their drivers.

With little to lose, it's perhaps no surprise to see McLaren going to the greatest lengths to make something happen in Baku.

As well as their mandatory single set of mediums, they'll have just two sets of the so-called 'prime' soft tyre. That will leave them with ten supersofts to play with over the weekend - the most of any team.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.