Pirelli wants to continue spicing up Formula 1

Paul Hembery, the head of competition at Pirelli, expressed satisfaction with the Italian manufacturer’s 2011 season. He believes that the requests made by the teams, fans, and sport officials were heard and fulfilled by Pirelli, which resulted in a more exciting season than previous years.

We were asked to bring something different to this sport for 2011. We were challenged to create tires that degrade, tires with a high wear rate, to force some pit stops. We feel that by the end of the season we succeeded in doing that, Hembery told Sky Sports.

Hembery also admitted that he was surprised by the criticism directed at Pirelli at the beginning of the season for being too aggressive, but also at the end of the season, for ultimately being too cautious.

It’s funny because at the beginning of the season, we were criticized for being perhaps too aggressive and at the end (of the season) for being too conservative. In reality, this comes from the fact that the drivers and teams were able to get accustomed to the tires and they were able to adjust their settings to maximize what we made available to them.

The engineers at Pirelli have heard the grievances and requests from fans as well as from people in Formula 1, and things are going to change in 2012. The performance gaps between the tires will be reduced to give priority back to strategy, thereby adding more suspense to the races.

This obviously means that we had to be a bit more aggressive for 2012, we changed three compounds that we used last season, the softs, mediums, and hards, and the performance gaps between them will be closer, which should improve strategy.

« This is the plan no matter what happens. We obviously don’t know what the single-seaters will look like; we will find out in a few days when we start our winter testing program in Spain. The single-seaters should be slightly modified considering the ban on blown diffusers, and the cornering speed should be lower, but you never know. »

These guys who design these single-seaters are the best in the world, they always manage to come up with incredible ideas and maybe it won’t be true and we will see single-seaters similar to those of 2011. But our intention is to try to replicate what we did, to try to be aggressive and do a bit to make this sport exciting.

The Pirelli competition manager also touched on one of the major issues with the tires in 2011, the marbles – or rubber balls in French – which accumulated on the edge of the track and made overtaking off the racing line complicated at times.

« We have made a few changes to slightly improve that. You still have rubber marbles, melted bits of rubber. What usually happens is that it accumulates on the outside of the corners – the rubber wears off during braking and is ejected as you go through the corner.»

« We had a few races, Malaysia is probably the worst example, where the rubber would lay down on the part before the turn, it’s something we tried to improve, but it’s hard to simulate that when you only have one test car because you can’t do enough tests to evaluate that. »

The engineers have worked to try to solve this problem, but Pirelli cannot promise anything regarding the resolution of this issue as the rubber deposit on the track is an inherent problem due to tire wear.

«We will try to do something, but unfortunately if you want to have tires that wear out, the rubber has to go somewhere and all you can do is try to change the wear mechanism so that the bits coming off the tires are slightly smaller so it doesn’t create such an effect.»

We will continue to work on this, I won’t say we have a solution because we won’t know until the competition resumes, but in the end, we still had the highest number of overtakes in the history of the sport last year.

Paul Hembery also revealed during the Autosport International, a show organized by a British automotive magazine, that Pirelli had been working on marking its tires to allow fans and journalists to more easily see which tires are mounted on each car.

«We made some modifications after Singapore – we used a different type of marking on the tires – but we are going to increase the size of the markings on the tires and we think that will help to recognize which tires are mounted on the car.»

Pirelli had also conducted tests, particularly in Abu Dhabi, to display directly on television screens the tires fitted on the visible single-seater. This addition of information for spectators and viewers will continue in 2012, even if the system still needs to be developed.

We are working with the FOM to ensure there are some indications on the screens to make sure the spectators know which tires are on the car, and we will have to wait and see after the first race to know if it worked.

At the same event, Hembery revealed that the tire structure had been modified in preparation for the 2012 season, particularly concerning the rear tires.

We have changed the profile of the rear tire and done a bit of work on the construction to have a bit more footprint (of the tire on the ground) because we think, perhaps wrongly, that there will be slightly less downforce in 2012 – at least at the beginning of the season.

The year 2011 was a good experience for Pirelli, as the engineers now know which tires to use on each circuit and they will therefore be able to take risks based on this experience.

With the knowledge we have now, because we didn’t know each circuit before F1, we will be able to make more aggressive tire choices for each race.

Pirelli’s objective for 2012 will therefore be to continue its learning process in Formula 1, to keep providing great entertainment for all the fans, and also to present some challenges and puzzles to the engineers of the various teams by supplying tires more difficult to analyze than in 2011.

Martin Whitmarsh said in Brazil that he wanted Pirelli to continue offering them challenges and pushing the limits, so that’s what we will try to do, concluded Hembery.