Pirelli is hoping to engineer a sudden drop-off in performance back into its tyres for 2016 in order to make racing more exciting.

Since Pirelli returned to the sport in 2011, its tyres have been characterised by a quick degradation of performance during races. It has opened up potential strategy options and helped aid overtaking as fresher tyres offer a significant performance advantage over used ones.

However, Pirellis tyres over the last two years have not been as extreme and the loss of performance has been more gradual than it was in previous seasons. Pirelli is hoping to bring back the sudden drop-off in performance in next year's tyres and will test some solutions in Abu Dhabi at next week's one-day test to try to achieve that.

"We'd love to bring back a proper 'cliff', if we can engineer that in," Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery said. "I don't know if we're going to have enough opportunity to get a solution that works perfectly during the Abu Dhabi test.

"We've got a couple of ideas. I'll know after Abu Dhabi whether it's worked or not. The ideal situation would be to have a 'cliff' back so we can get back to two or three stops rather than pushing the stint lengths as we've had as a tendency of the last two years."

Hembery said the key to achieving a 'cliff' in performance is down to the chemical balance of the compound.

"It would be a compounding thing, something that we're looking at," Hembery continued. "It's things maybe we can do inside the tyre to try and create a kind of 'cliff' which could be a chemically-engineered one, so that it becomes unbeneficial to stay out for longer stints.

"If there's one input we've had it's that they [the teams] really want to get back to two or three stops rather than the predominant one stop racing we've had this year."