Three races down, what are people's opinions on the new tyres?
Personally I think they're spot on in terms of how long they last; three stops today with the option of two. But the degradation is way too high, the drivers are having to nurse them way too much. In 2011 the wear was high, even higher than this year, but the degradation was lower which opened up the strategy more. The teams were given a choice of running the tyres hard and doing an extra stop and we saw a lot of races where they would run options until they ran out because they could push them hard without taking too much laptime out of them, it just cost them an extra stop. This year they seem to have to nurse the so much through a stint, because if they push, the laptimes fall off so much that they're unable to regain the time needed to pit.
I think it's having a detrimental effect on racing too. Drivers are being told to back off from cars they're not significantly faster than, because the increased degradation caused by following a car closely means after a couple of laps the tyres will be too damaged to follow closely and they'll start losing time.
There were signs of this towards the end of last year. There were a few races where Pirelli brought hard compounds to make one stop races. In light of widespread criticism that the drivers were unable to push the idea was that they'd bring tyres that could easily make the end so they didn't have to be conserved. But the problem of high degradation still existed, so the drivers still had to be careful through the race so the pace was still there at the end of their stints. And this year the tyres are even more extreme in terms of degradation, to the extent that in Australia they were losing large chunks of time by the third sector on options, meaning to set a fast qualifying lap it was quicker to conserve slightly in the first half of the lap than push the whole way round.
They're not going to do anything about this year, like Kimi says, you'd better like it or do something else, but I hope they sort it out for next season (assuming their contract is renewed), it's killing the action a bit.
Personally I think they're spot on in terms of how long they last; three stops today with the option of two. But the degradation is way too high, the drivers are having to nurse them way too much. In 2011 the wear was high, even higher than this year, but the degradation was lower which opened up the strategy more. The teams were given a choice of running the tyres hard and doing an extra stop and we saw a lot of races where they would run options until they ran out because they could push them hard without taking too much laptime out of them, it just cost them an extra stop. This year they seem to have to nurse the so much through a stint, because if they push, the laptimes fall off so much that they're unable to regain the time needed to pit.
I think it's having a detrimental effect on racing too. Drivers are being told to back off from cars they're not significantly faster than, because the increased degradation caused by following a car closely means after a couple of laps the tyres will be too damaged to follow closely and they'll start losing time.
There were signs of this towards the end of last year. There were a few races where Pirelli brought hard compounds to make one stop races. In light of widespread criticism that the drivers were unable to push the idea was that they'd bring tyres that could easily make the end so they didn't have to be conserved. But the problem of high degradation still existed, so the drivers still had to be careful through the race so the pace was still there at the end of their stints. And this year the tyres are even more extreme in terms of degradation, to the extent that in Australia they were losing large chunks of time by the third sector on options, meaning to set a fast qualifying lap it was quicker to conserve slightly in the first half of the lap than push the whole way round.
They're not going to do anything about this year, like Kimi says, you'd better like it or do something else, but I hope they sort it out for next season (assuming their contract is renewed), it's killing the action a bit.
