Originally Posted by bystander:
“"Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery says the Formula 1 tyre supplier will be less "conservative" in 2012 and reveals they hope to provide more excitement during the new season, with "closer racing at the front" high on the agenda.
The Italian company has made each of their four dry-weather tyres softer this season, increasing their rate of degradation and reducing the time they take to warm to their optimum temperature, as well as closing the gap in performance between the compounds themselves."
I'm not quite sure I understand how the tyre situation will work.
I've read that the times between the tyres are much closer yet the softer tyres will degrade quicker.
It sounds like a tacticians nightmare and hopefully some great racing.”
It is a strange one isn't it?
Obviously, it's all guesswork until Melbourne (or maybe even Malaysia or China) but I kinda get the feeling it's like when they talk to a car designer about the new car...
They'll always
say "Oh yeah, the loss of double diffusers/blown diffusers/f-ducts/whatever has reduced the available downforce so we might struggle a bit" when the reality is that, somehow, the cars are almost always
faster each year.
The way I heard it was that a lot of teams were complaining that by the time you've done an out-lap, two timed laps with a slow lap in the middle and then an in-lap the softest tyres were almost shagged so, for the race, you'd only be able to do a couple of laps before having to pit and, thus, it was a bit pointless going to the effort of qualifying on the softs.
As a result of this, the teams were asking for the soft tyres to be made harder and, of course, once you do
that you've got to improve the hard tyres by a similar margin.
It DOES occur to me, however, that Pirelli might have improved the tyres BUT, because of the reduced downforce this year, they're still expecting the tyres to wear just as quickly.
In fact, thinking about it, I'm sure I heard somewhere that they've, basically, just moved each tyre "up" by a category so that they've junked last years super-soft and rebranded last years soft tyre as this years super-soft etc.
Thing is, depending on how well the teams have adapted to the loss of rear grip, you might see cars shredding the improved tyres even quicker OR, if the teams are bullshitting, the tyres might last longer than expected.
I suspect that, depending on the levels of grip that this years car have, Pirelli might be forced to tinker with the compounds again as the year progresses.