Was Pirelli too conservative in Valencia?

For once, the European Grand Prix, held for the fourth consecutive time in Valencia, was quite dull. Despite the double DRS activation zone, the event was relatively lacking in excitement, at least compared to what we have seen since the start of this season.

But Pirelli’s choice to bring slightly harder tires than expected – soft and medium rather than super soft and soft – seems, in hindsight, a bit too conservative, as admitted by Paul Hembery, head of Pirelli Competizioni, in the columns of Autosport. From our point of view, the conservative choice of medium tires did not help. If we had brought the super soft tires, they wouldn’t have worked superbly here because it was far too hot for them, but the drivers would have used them in qualifying and if they managed to get just 8 laps out of them in the race, it would have forced them to rely more on the soft tires, perhaps to the limit.

They would have just needed a few laps on each set of soft tires, some would have made it, others not, and that would have resulted in a bit more performance differences between the cars since the tires degrade more.

«Having the super soft tires might have created a slightly more interesting race, but I doubt it would have changed things significantly. It probably wouldn’t have been as exciting as some other races we have seen. »

But Paul Hembery thinks there’s no need to panic. I suppose we all got a bit bored because we’ve been used to a lot of excitement this year. We had a relatively monotonous race and we’re starting to worry, but now we’re heading to Silverstone: it’s an aggressive high-speed circuit.