Pirelli sure a single stop race is possible at Monza
Pirelli's motorsport director Paul Hembery has commented on today's tyre performances during qualifying, noting that a single stopper would be easily achievable. With the hard and medium tyres, single and two-stop strategies are therefore the most obvious choices, just as they were at the Belgian GP one week ago.
Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery commented: “Again we’ve seen very good performance and durability from our tyres today, as the closeness of the competition in both free practice and qualifying showed."
"Although there are many places in Monza that put a lot of energy through the tyres, the overall wear rate has been very good today, which allowed a number of the drivers to set their fastest times later on in their runs. Degradation is comparatively low, while we have the usual levels of wear on the front-right tyre due to the characteristics of the Parabolica."
Pirelli notes that the lower degradation are largely influenced by Pirelli's change of tyre design and their choice to allocate different compounds to the Belgian and Italian events.
Hembery continued: "We’ve reduced the tread gauge for the Belgian and Italian Grands Prix this year, which diminishes heat build-up and reduces blistering but accounts for the tyres taking slightly longer to warm up, particularly at Monza where downforce levels are extremely low. The benefit of that is improved durability and with only about 0.3 seconds per lap time difference between the two compounds, we could be in line to see quite a variety of different strategies tomorrow with both two stops and perhaps even one stop possible. We saw some of the teams using slipstreaming on the straights in order to boost the performance of the car and tyres, which can be worth a tenth of a second or so around here: a clear illustration of the importance of tactics and strategy in every aspect of Formula One. As always the atmosphere in Monza has been amazing, with so much enthusiasm from all the fans: it’s a real privilege to call this our home race.”
