The Friday practice sessions for the United States Grand Prix in Austin and for the Mexico Grand Prix were conditioned by 180 minutes of free practice dedicated to testing the new Pirelli 2023 tyres. The tests were conducted to finalize the compositions of the compounds, after the structure had been frozen at the end of summer – early autumn.
The new tire structure is an important element of change for the 2023 Formula 1 season, one of the few to break an otherwise total technical continuity regarding the regulation for next year. To fix the problems that emerged at the beginning of the season, the Italian company opted to strengthen the 2023 product, in order to decrease the pressure with a greater grip guaranteed by the rubber, at the same time affecting the balance of the car.
Back in July, Pirelli’s Head of F1 & Car Racing Mario Isola explained for FormulaPassion.it how, despite the new regulations should have prevented the transfer of heat between the braking group-rim-tire to manage the temperature of the tires, the teams were still able to replicate the phenomenon. Pirelli in particular found a high level of control of the growth in tire pressures, greater than expected:
“This year we have reduced the temperature of the front tire warmers by 30 ° C, which is equivalent to about 3 psi of pressure increase. So, for example, if they started at 20 psi last year and then raised 1 psi in the race, this season we expected an increase of 4 psi. All the teams, however, manage to contain it at 2 psi, so they are able to control it through the cooling inside the rim.” – Mario Isola explained.
To counteract the reduced increase in pressures inflation with the car in motion, in order not to jeopardize the structural integrity of the product, Pirelli was forced to increase the values for static pressures, as explained by Mario Isola: “The cars are strong, the performance is high, perhaps more than initially thought and despite the fact that many components have been standardized and the temperatures of the tire warmers have been lowered, the teams are very good at not increasing the pressures between static and running conditions so much. Since what interests us is that the running pressure reaches a certain level, during the races thanks to the data collected we had seen that this growth was lower than we had estimated and therefore we raised the initial static pressures a little to balance this effect” – the Pirelli boss added.
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The 2022 single-seaters thus found themselves running with high inflation pressures, particularly at the front, as underlined by Pirelli chief engineer Simone Berra to the RaceFans editorial team: “At the moment we have a big difference [in pressure, ed.] Between the front and rear and we would like to reduce it a bit. Our goal is to run with lower front pressures “. Taking the values of the last three world championship rounds, it becomes clear what Simone Berra describes:
The higher inflation pressures at the front have accentuated the understeer behavior of the 2022 cars, a factor that has certainly not helped teams which, like Red Bull, struggled with a car already prone to understeer in the first part of the season. However, engineer Simone Berra explains that the 2023 tires will have a reinforced structure, allowing pressure to drop without jeopardizing the integrity of the rubber: “The new structure is more rigid and ensures greater structural resistance, so that we can go down with the pressure and that the tyre can work better”.
“We had information that the front tires are the weakest axle at the moment, so we worked a lot on the front structure,” explains Berra. “The new structure, with the new integrity test we did on the front, gives us the possibility to slightly decrease the front pressure. Therefore, what we expect for next year, if the load peaks do not change too much, is that the front pressure will decrease a bit” – he concluded.
The new Pirelli tyres will therefore alter the balance of the car, moving the limit more towards the rear axle. A change that teams will have to be able to anticipate in the design phase of the 2023 cars, especially regarding the mechanics of the suspensions.
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