Drivers and teams have expressed concerns over the amount of tyre wear caused by the abrasive concrete surface at the Tempelhof circuit.

“I think the issue that all the drivers are having today is tyre degradation,” Virgin Racing team boss Alex Tai told Current E. “Now we have to balance out how we use our tyre resource, how much we use in qualifying and how much we save for the race. I think it could be a real issue for some teams. I think you’ll find at the end of the race that there’s a lot of people that are running out of grip because they wear out their front tyres and they’ll become significantly slower and we’ll see a lot of passing at the end of the race. We hope we will not be one of those teams.”

“There’s huge tyre deg,” Dragon Racing driver Jerome d’Ambrosio confirmed. “The main problem is not the tyre deg itself: it’s the marbles it creates on track. You’ve got marbles everywhere and that’s going to be a real real challenge in the race. The drop in lap times is not too bad. You rip the tyre up but you don’t lose that much.”

Audi Sport ABT boss Hans-Jungen Abt told Current E: “For the tyres, it will be hard because there’s big degradation but the track itself is fine.”

The worries are heightened given that teams are expected to use the same set of low profile, 18 inch treaded tyres for the whole race day, in a bid to maximise sustainability and minimise materials and shipping costs.

Trulli driver Tonio Liuzzi said: “It’s not as great as usual because the surface is absorbing more from the tyres, so we struggled a bit more. Obviously the consistency of the tyre has always been great at the tracks so I think we just need to wait until the track has rubbered down a little more. It should be better in the next runs.”

If tyre wear does pose a significant issue in FP2, we could see drivers being far more cautious and perhaps undertaking fewer flying laps in quali, in a bit to preserve grip for the race itself. That will be important here in Berlin, where the track will encourage overtaking.

Tai said: “Performance can drop off. It’s not a sheer cliff but as soon as it starts you lose a significant amount of front end grip and you can’t attack anymore.”