Paul Hembery: Pirelli to change shape of rear tyres for 2012 to improve degradation – Formula 1
Pirelli motorsports director Paul Hembery has stated that the shape of the rear tyres will be slightly altered for the 2012 Formula 1 season to improve the degradation rate.
Hembery stated that although the feedback from the current tyres has been enormous already but the company feels that still some of the races were not quite interesting as the others probably due to the tyres.
Hembery stated, “It's Pirelli wanting to improve its product, from our point of view, improve the wear, and improve the shape of the wear profile across the tyre. The shape, yes [will change]. It's hard to quantify by how much it's going to change.”
Hembery added that the new rubber would have been tried in the 2011 season as well but Pirelli has just come into the sport and did not want to make sudden changes.
“At the moment we're not utilising the full footprint there, which we knew about, but we had to try and block some of the development because we had so little time and we wanted to at least give the teams some fixed data that we're new to the sport and not
wanting to keep making changes,” commented Hembery.
Pirelli took over from Bridgestone for the 2011 season and beyond and developed four compounds of tyres keeping in mind the nature of the tracks all around the globe.
The feedback from just the first nine races of the season has been enormous as a record number of overtaking moves have been witnessed in the 2011 season so far, but still Hembery thinks that there is room for improvement.
Some of the 2011 races like Monaco were not as interesting as the others where Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel was able to do almost 40 laps on one set of tyres and was not overtaken.
Let’s see how the Pirelli tyres fare in the upcoming German Grand Prix that is scheduled to take place in Nurburgring on July 24, 2011.
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