Paul Hembery, a former Pirelli Motorsport boss, was recently interviewed by RacingNews365.com and pointed out the missed opportunity for Formula 1 to do something completely unique when the decision was made to switch from the old 13-inch tires to the new size of 18 in 2022.
It is a new engineering challenge for Formula 1 teams to tackle after more than 30 years of small tyres, but Paul Hembery believes F1 should have considered introducing even larger tyres: “On some levels, I was quite keen on the 13-inch tyres, because it gave Formula 1 cars a different look. Possibly, it would have been more interesting to go to 19 [inches]. There’s only one championship I recall that runs on 19, that’s Ferrari Challenge. So 18 is a little bit [the] same as existing championships. Maybe there was a trick missed there”. – he explained.
However, Paul Hembery said the switch to 18-inch tires still represents a new challenge for the teams, who must forget everything they have learned in the past about tires: “The teams have got to throw away a lot of data. They’ve got years of data of running the previous generation tyres. So they’re gonna have a lot of unknowns, how the tyres will react in real conditions. They’ve clearly got the simulators running and, judging from what I’m told, the performance of the package is probably faster and stronger than what anybody had envisaged when the rules were being made.” – he added.
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Paul Hembery believes that there are still many obstacles that could impact the hierarchy of the 2022 grid:
“There’s a whole lot of areas there that the teams won’t yet understand. They will do all the simulation they want but, as we’ve seen in previous years when there’s been big changes, there’s always a couple of teams that struggle, there’s always a couple of teams that really dominate and get on top of things very rapidly. So that is to be expected. With no great changes to the power train, you would still expect strong showings from the last group of winning cars, so you’d have to expect Mercedes and Red Bull to be strong. Let’s see where Ferrari are, with having had time to digest the new regs and make a push after backing off, from the outside, for the last year. McLaren, as well, have been edging closer and closer to the top group. Alpine will be interesting, they have all the facilities, they’ve made huge investments into the Enstone setup. They’ve made changes to their structure and that’s obviously with a view to becoming one of the top runners. It’s always interesting when there’s a rule change. As fans, we’re all hoping that the running order will be substantially disrupted. That’s no disrespect to Red Bull or Mercedes, it’s just as a fan, you just want to see something a little bit different, even if you can obviously respect the quality of work that the top teams provide!” – he concluded.
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