Not sure if this was a mistake on my part or a glitch/bug.
Setting up in the final 10-15 minutes before lockout. Water level was around 2.9 mm. Ran 2 laps with each car, adjusted pitstops and advanced options and then proceeded to wait in case conditions changed. Water depth was set for 1mm and stops raining for 5 laps. The water level starts to fall. With 5-6 minutes left, it's down to 1.0 mm. At this point, I'm confidant it will be 0.0 mm by lights out, but still have some water on track for qualifying. Knowing I should be able to switch from rain tires to a slick between qualifying and right before lights out (3-5 minutes before, I forget which) I plan to qualify on inters and then switch to softs. However I wasn't entirely sure how to achieve this.
I knew water levels 0.1 - 0.9 were being ignored by my current settings. However, I was unsure what tire would be used for qualifying if I changed water depth to 0mm; my pitstop strategy or my water depth setting. After all, there would be no benefit if my cars were switched to inters after qualifying on softs. Unsure and with only 2 minutes left, I switched water depth to 0mm, and my stint 1 tire to inters.
First comes the good news. With 0.3mm of water on track, my cars qualify 1-2. Now for the bad. I join the race and go to pitstop tabs for both cars to change to softs (the tire I have set to switch to if the rain stops). Much to my dismay, my only choices were inters or wets. As a side note, 2 of my fellow managers had qualified on softs, but were switched to inters. 1 of them had the option to switch back to softs, the other was in the same predicament as me. I quit the race rejoined, hoping it would change my options. No good. The pit tab didn't change until it switched to its standard in race layout, dooming me, and my aforementioned competitor, to start on inters on a now dry track.
Should I have set my stint 1 tires to softs? Would lowering the stops raining to 0 or 1 laps have helped? Or was what I tried to achieve impossible?
race link