Pirelli willing to supply more wet tyres
Pirelli's motorsport director Paul Hembery has hinted that the tyre company could supply more wet tyres to encourage running during entirely wet race weekends. Currently teams are careful not to waste the full wet tyres as there are only 3 sets available per car for the entire weekend.
As both Friday free practice sessions were wet, teams were allocated an extra set of intermediate tyres as per a new regulation introduced last year to encourage extra running. This brought their total allocation up to three sets of Cinturato Blue wets and five sets of Cinturato Green intermediates (one set of which will be returned tonight). The slick tyres nominated for the weekend are the P Zero Silver hard and P Zero Yellow soft.
The full wet tyres were mostly used today, which are capable of dispersing 60 litres of water per second at full speed. The afternoon free practice session started off in even wetter conditions than the morning session – but with more rain expected this weekend, this provided a useful opportunity for the drivers to get used to the wet lines at Silverstone and try out the upgrades that many teams have brought.
Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery commented:
“With the British summer weather at its best, we could be facing our first full wet weekend from start to finish, without running the dry tyres at all! As tricky as the conditions are, it was important for the drivers to get a feel for them today in case this is how the situation will remain for the rest of the weekend. A few drivers tried the intermediate at the end of the second session in order to have some idea of crossover points, which are likely to be one of the keys to the strategy."
"Conditions like this often result in surprises, so we are almost certainly in for an unpredictable weekend but it’s a pity for the fans who didn’t get to see much running today. Together with the teams we can certainly look at some solutions to encourage more running under these circumstances in future, such as allocating more tyres, but everybody would have to agree to this as we’re not in a position to make the tyre rules ourselves. We’ve seen some teams run many more laps than others today, with Sauber completing the most, so this could be an indication that we will see some quite different strategies on race day. And If we end up using the wet tyres in the race, one set of full wet tyres has a predicted life of around 60 laps.”
