WILL TESTING SHOW PIRELLI HAS GONE AGGRESSIVE ENOUGH?
For the sake of Formula 1 and ‘the show’, I certainly hope so! It was a shame that we ended up with tyres that were so conservative last year, although from Pirelli’s standpoint
I do understand why it made the choice. It doesn’t have the opportunity to test as often as it would like – or as often as Bridgestone and Michelin did previously – and Pirelli was slightly misled by the downforce predictions from some of the teams last year.
With the new regulations for 2017, some teams had very high expectations in terms of the aero numbers and therefore what the g-loads going into the tyres would be. This somewhat skewed the picture for Pirelli and it was always going to take a safer route than not.
However, I do wonder that after winter testing, when we could already see that the ultrasoft was running for ages, whether Pirelli could have worked with the teams and the
FIA to produce a softer range for the second half of the season. I recognise that there are lengthy production lead times to be considered, but I do wish that collectively everyone had been more proactive to make some changes.
The new hypersoft for 2018 will hopefully bring back some two-stop races, because the one-stoppers are pretty dull for everyone. Personally, I think it would have been much simpler to just have tyres called soft, medium and hard every weekend, with only Pirelli and the teams knowing what the tyre is via a separate numerical code system. We’re now going to have weekends where the supersoft is the hardest tyre in the range and that seems a bit odd, but hey-ho – as long as the racing is better, I don’t care so much.
One big issue that could crop up is that the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, where all the eight days of pre-season testing are scheduled to take place, has just been completely resurfaced. Mario Isola from Pirelli has already said that this could make judging the track evolution hard for the first couple of days. In my experience, every time a track is resurfaced it takes a good few months for the surface to settle down and for us to really get a handle on what the grip level is. I remember when they did Donington Park between the 2003 and ’04 seasons, all of a sudden we all had to run the wet set-up to get any form of grip! More recently, surface changes at Sepang and Jerez have completely changed the grip levels and the teams will really have to think hard about this when they evaluate their new cars and the relative competitive levels across the field.