The ease with which drivers were able to run one-stop strategies in Australia has led to fears that most races this season will see limited strategical options, and hence less potential for action at the front.

This year's tyres compounds are harder as a result of a move to allow drivers to push more during the races, rather than being conservative with their tyres, like over the past seasons.

The 2017 rubber had to be designed on the basis of downforce levels at the end of the season, after extensive development by teams, and as that unfolds, the tyres will be used much harder.

Pirelli's F1 technical boss Mario Isola is confident that as the cars get faster, degradation will increase, leading to move varied strategies.

"That's still our expectation for the second part of the season," Isola told Motorsport.com. "Obviously cars will be quicker, and quicker means more stress on the tyres, and therefore more degradation.

"This is quite a normal relationship between stress on the tyres, and degradation. So we will have higher numbers for degradation in the second part of the season, but still in the range of the [FIA] target letter.

"We will have some weekends when we will have two stops. It is not written in stone that we will have all the races with one stop. Obviously if we consider Monaco, I can tell you now we will have one stop!

"If we go to Suzuka, if we go to Spa, if we go to severe circuits, we will have a two-stop race. But I don't think that one stop means necessarily that we will have a boring race. We had a quite interesting fight in Australia between Sebastian and Lewis."

Isola admits that in Australia degradation was less that the FIA had requested, but he insists the numbers will balance out over the season.

"In Australia degradation was quite low, a big change in behaviour compared with last year. This is clearly visible from the lap times. They were able to do a fast laptime with tyres that were 10-15 laps old.

"The degradation numbers were set in the target letter, and at the moment we are a bit lower compared to the numbers. The numbers are very precise, and it's difficult to have exactly that number.

"For example, the delta lap time [between compounds] in the target letter was 0.9s, but it's an average, because then you have different circuits with different lengths, with different situations. So it could be 0.7s, it could be 1.1s."