Pirelli forecasts simpler strategies
F1’s sole tyre manufacturer Pirelli is confident that it has got through all its homework before the new generation’s cars of the 2017 season roll onto the track in Barcelona in a couple of days’ time.
The Italian company is part of the package of sweeping changes F1 introduces for 2017. This thorough change of rules include wider aerodynamic parts and wider front and rear tyres.
Pirelli will introduce tyres which grew by about 25 per cent in width. The company conducted a deep testing programme over the last seven months. With the ‘mule’ cars of Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes, the Milan-based manufacturer completed around 12000 kms, 24 days which included special rain tyre tests.
Pirelli analysed the data collected over the test outings and received the latest downforce simulations from the teams. The company’s motorsport director Paul Hembery expects much simpler race strategies thanks to the reliable working and lower degradation of Pirelli’s 2017 products.
“Race strategy will be simplified, less degradation. There’ll be less margin for teams to use a tyre change to create a positional change,” the Briton started his analysis.
“That’s a consequence of having less degradation. Certainly during the testing, albeit on the mule car which is a lot slower, there was a clear difference in the data we saw between 2016 compounds compared to what we’re going to see this season. It’s a notable difference. There should be less wear and less marbles. ”
Pirelli often had to bear harsh criticism about the rather narrow working range of its tyres. It often complicated the setup work of teams as small differences in temperature could change completely the behaviour of the rubber.
Hembery said the company has conducted serious work in that area and he expects a more predictable working behaviour from the tyres.
"The temperature windows are wider, they should be less sensitive to the windows that we had in the past. The working range should still be a bit more workable than in the past. You still have the high and low of the past, but it’s more medium high and medium low. The compounds will be closer together in terms of performance, you won’t have the 1.3/1.4-sec, that will come down we believe to under one second.”
Pirelli’s managing director Mario Isola said that Pirelli also prepared backup tyres. As the company developed its products mainly based on computer simulation, it decided to design tyres which can be used if the data was not close to the reality.
"In the first five races, we will only use the basic compounds. We developed them on the basis of the information collected from our testing and the simulations.”
"But some elements are difficult to predict, so we have prepared five reserve compounds that can be used if the real track data does not coincide with what we simulated," Isola concluded.
