In the usual preview released by Scuderia Ferrari, the Italian side’s chief strategist Inaki Rueda once again wanted to draw the guidelines for the highly anticipated British weekend in which drivers and teams will also experience the first Sprint Race.
“Silverstone is a historic track” – Inaki Rueda begins his analysis ahead of the British weekend – “It consists of a large number of medium-high speed corners and represents a real challenge for the tires. Pirelli has decided to bring the hardest compounds in its possession, not so much due to the temperatures we will encountere during the weekend, but above all for the great stress to which the tires will be subjected precisely because of these croners.” – he explained.
“A new format has been devised for Great Britain. An experiment that Formula 1 wants to do this year in three different locations” – Inaki Rueda said before continuing with the explanation: “We will see its official debut at Silverstone. On Friday we will have only one hour of free practice, then we will go straight to qualifying. The performance of the latter will be the same as always with Q1, Q2 and Q3. The resulting classification will be the starting order for the Sprint Race on Saturday. Once in qualifying, the cars will enter the parc fermé regime. Drivers and engineers will thus have a single session to best configure the car’s set-up, the one with which they will face the rest of the weekend.”
“Since in Q2 and Q3 we would be required to use only the Soft compounds, on Saturday we will have no restrictions regarding the use of tires” continues the Maranello technician. “The choice of compounds will be free and, in the sprint race, there will not even be a mandatory pit stop. It will therefore be enough to complete a stint of 17 laps to finish the race. We will not have any limitations on the use of fuel, although I think we will need to take some care of the tires. Apart from that it will only be a matter of pushing hard without any limits. The result of the sprint race will determine the Sunday starting grid. Grand Prix in which, as usual, we will complete 52 laps.”
The most interesting part concerns the introduction of the new Pirelli tyre specification. Solutions that in addition to ensuring greater safety, after the events that took place in Azerbaijan, should finally allow the teams to also race with lower pressure levels, thus also improving the performance of the cars.
“After the problems encountered in Baku,” Inaki Rueda recalls, “Pirelli has decided to introduce a new tire specification. The initial approach was to force ourselves to simply use higher pressures. This would have ensured the integrity of the tire, but at the expense of grip. Thus, a different construction was achieved, capable of allowing the tire to work with lower pressures similar to those originally had. We had the opportunity to test two sets of this new specification in Austria and we believe that Pirelli has done a really good job”, the Spanish technician added – “The intention is to go back to using such pressure as to allow F1 cars to be able to express themselves at their best”.
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