Pirelli’s steps to ensure parity between teams: “We have a solid system”. Pirelli's steps to ensure parity between teams.

Formula One official tyre supplier Pirelli boss Mario Isola reflects on the steps taken to ensure no one teams gets an unfair tyre advantage, from random barcodes to one engineer per team and bespoke software. Next season Formula 1 will continue with the 2019 tyres after the teams unanimously voted down the 2020 rubber following the Abu Dhabi tyre test.

However, not all the teams were happy with this year’s tyres, which featured a thinner tread that, at least in 2018, seems to play to Mercedes’ strengths.

Mario Isola, though, says Pirelli do everything they can to ensure fair play amongst the teams: “We’ve a solid system,” he explained to sport360.com – “It is clear when you are the sole supplier that the priority is to ensure that we respect the sporting regulations, to supply the same product to everyone and this is feasible thanks to a system with the FIA, where they send us the barcodes. We are not producing the barcodes ourselves. We receive them from the FIA and from their supplier. When we prepare the tyres for an event, we put on the barcode on the sidewall before the curing process. After the tyre is ready and finished, you cannot take out the barcodes. It is impossible. When we have the 1,800 barcodes for the event, we send it to the FIA. The FIA has software that has random allocation for each car. We then associate each tyre with each different car. This is a system that guarantees that we cannot make a special tyre for anybody.” – he explained.

The barcodes, though, are just one part of it: “The second part is the service,” he continued. “We have one engineer allocated to every team. We have a strict process to follow and the way in which the engineers prepare the report and give information. It’s the same for all engineers, to ensure we don’t give any advantage to any team. All the engineers are aware of it and know what to do. We have a bespoke software to do it. With this software they cannot access the data of another team. They only have authorisation to the data of the team where they are located. There are only a few people in Pirelli who have access to all the teams data and they are mainly based in Milan, because they need to analyse all the data. Trackside engineers don’t have this option.” – Pirelli boss Mario Isola concluded.