A plan to bring back heavily degrading tyres in the 2020 Formula One season is now set to be scrapped, according to Pirelli. In recent years, Pirelli has built tyres that allow drivers to push for longer periods, something they couldn’t do in the opening seasons of the Pirelli years when it reentered the sport in 2011.
Pirelli faced competition to be Formula 1’s sole tyre supplier from 2020 to 2023, but managed to secure a contract last year, in which it stated the tyre supplier should set targets for high degradation – as much as two seconds of lap time over 10% of a race distance.
However that is not set to be the case anymore, according to Pirelli’s head of motorsport Mario Isola: “We have an ongoing discussion with both FIA and FOM and also the teams to understand which is the direction,” he said to RaceFans.net – “If you look at the tender document released by the FIA – the target letter that was appended to the document – they were thinking [about] very high degradation tyres. But looking at what happened last year now we quite agree that it is probably not the right direction.”
Mario Isola added that Pirelli’s attempts to introduce more pit stops during a race has resulted in teams finding more ways to manage their tyres: “We tried to be a lot aggressive with the three compounds and basically the teams were increasing the pace management to go on a one-stop.”
Isola also revealed that Pirelli has a headache when it comes to selecting the three compounds it brings to a weekend, as it is difficult to factor in strategies when doing so: “If we go conservative with all the three compounds then the hardest of the three is not chosen by anybody and you just have the mandatory set,” he said. If we use the two soft that are quite close and a hard that is one step harder, nobody is using this one. If we use two conservative and one that is more aggressive – the softest is one step more aggressive, then we create an issue to the midfield because the top teams try to qualify on the medium while the others are obliged to use the soft and their race is done. So it’s difficult. We don’t have the perfect solution. What we are trying to do is to run many simulations with different delta lap times with different levels of degradation to understand which is the best. That is not perfect, but at least is in the right direction.” – Pirelli’s head of motorsport concluded.
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