What kills me about this event is how much quicker the FRONT tires wear down compared to the BACK. Yesterday I ran this event with the TS030 because I knew it would be an easy victory, but I wanted to go as gentle as I could on the tires, especially the fronts. That meant turning down the brake bias a click from my normal setting and no trailbraking at all. I would get on my brakes much sooner than normal and scrub that speed away so my corner turn in would be considerably smoother than usual. Most of the time I would actually have to apply a little throttle because I actually slowed down too much! Now, I couldn't do this for every single corner. After all, I was still trying to win the race. I just wanted to see how much abuse I could keep off those front tires compared to my normal driving.
I've run this event with the Toyota TS030 four times now. This "experiment" was my fourth attempt with the car. On the first three attempts I decided to change my tires on the 7th lap, 6th lap and then 7th lap. For this run, I was able to wait until the 8th lap to change my tires and I seriously probably could have even gone one more lap, but the track was drying, I barely had a lead and with the track drying I knew the car in Position 2 would start driving much faster than I could with my degraded tires.
So, in conclusion, the front tires are going to still wear out faster than the rears even if you try to baby them considerably. With a car like the TS030, if you're going for the 1 stop strategy and only IM's, I say drive your normal style. There's really nothing to gain by babying the tires. You're still going to need that 1 pitstop, so you might as well try to put as much distance between yourself and the AI as possible.