CarlosFerreira wrote:I've been puzzling with regards to the tyre situation for this year. The softer rubber has been consistently too soft - it was so in Australia, less so in Malaysia, and now again in China the tyres are visibly coming apart after a few laps. Drivers with different styles and cars, such as Hamilton and Button, have both complained VERY LOUDLY that the tyres were no good. Funny enough, here's what Pirelli's Paul Hembery
had to say about it:
PaulHembery wrote:But Pirelli motorsport chief Paul Hembery said the soft tyre was doing exactly what it was supposed to.
"If the medium did the same then I'd be concerned, but it doesn't," he said.
"It's a qualifying tyre. It'll be a bit like Melbourne I guess where the top teams are going to be forced to qualify on the softer tyre because it's such a performance advantage and within the first 10 laps they are going to have to pit.
"Some of the Q2 teams might opt to start on the medium tyre and try and gain some track position whilst the first 10 cars drop in.
Welcome to enforced racing: the top 10 qualifiers WILL be forced to stop early and fall into the pack, who will be back there in the only tyre that works. Later in the race, there will be a further set of dancing chairs. This was decided further up, probably between the FIA, FOM and Pirelli.
Forget about DRS - this is what engineered racing is. What do people think? Do we dislike the racing being engineered, or do we dislike the early 2000s snorefests even more?
There is also a certain amount of influence from the teams on the tyre design too which has to be taken into consideration. From the point of view of a midfield team like, say, Sauber or Force India, the current situation is heavily to their advantage - with the performance gaps between the teams shrinking due to the tightness of the regulations, it only takes a small set up mistake from a major team for them to suddenly find themselves much higher up the running order than was ever possible under the Bridgestone era. Indeed, most of their best results have come under the current era precisely because they can run different strategies and exploit the problems the larger teams have, which has considerably raised their profiles and therefore potential attractiveness to sponsors, especially in 2012.
In the Bridgestone era, the durability and ultra-wide operating window meant that the top teams could comfortably run flat out and not care that much about strategy because the tyres compensated for that - it also accentuated performance differences quite sharply, because it meant that the top teams could ensure that they remained there. Now, the fact that the larger teams are effectively being dropped back into the pack creates opportunities for the midfield teams in terms of strategy, particularly if they can run a reverse strategy to the top teams, and, as you say, also creates a certain amount of artificial excitement through those major teams having to pass the midfield pack.
eytl wrote:(4) Similarly, constant radio communication which is even more sophisticated than previous decades - where teams now give drivers target lap times like in Sepang. Can you imagine that happening in the past? No - what would happen was that someone like a Mansell might decide to just go hell for leather, of his own choice, and decide to pit mid-race when he felt his tyres going off. Someone like Prost might choose to nurse his tyres, but he was in full control of his lap speed and it was up to his skill to judge whether he was nursing his rubber sufficiently.
Part of the problem, though, is that to a certain extent the importance of the drivers style has been partially reduced in some areas - with the tyres designed to thermally degrade rather than wear out, the driver himself has a more limited influence in controlling tyre wear as now the amount of energy going into the tyres is the larger problem, one which is aggravated in the higher speed parts of the track.
That said, to a certain extent the idea of driving to a target time is not exactly new - instances like Schumacher in the 1998 Hungarian GP, where Ross was providing him with target stint times between stops, are perhaps some of the better known examples. Going further back in time to the turbo era, IIRC Mansell talked quite a bit about how the engineers and drivers would plan, fairly methodically, when they would push and when they'd conserve fuel in the races, plans which did, to a certain extent, involve driving to target times.
pasta_maldonado wrote:I think the perfect situation would be to bring the two most suitable compounds for the race, along with one compound softer to act as a qualifying tyre (or in the case of SS and S, one harder to go further in the race). Given that the best strategy usually involves running both compounds, don't force the teams into running both, and make the tyre limit for the whole weekend rather than specific limits for each session. For teams that muck up their selections and have to use extra set of tyres than allocated for the whole weekend, apply a fine for each set used or dock points from the team. However, the qualifying tyre would be limited to just 2 sets, enabling two quick runs in quali, a quick run in quali and a lightning stint in the race, or two lightning stints in the race if the team so wished. This would also abolish the stupid drivers must start on their tyres from Q3.
But of course, common sense isn't available to anyone with any power in F1.
The thing is, Pirelli has said that it doesn't want to do that because of the costs involved in having to bring additional sets of tyres solely for qualifying - costs that it would pass onto the teams, who, as we have heard in the past, are not keen on having to foot that bill either. With few tyre manufacturers keen to return to F1 - we've seen Bridgestone, Michelin and Goodyear all move elsewhere - Pirelli is in an unusually strong position because there is no substantial threat right now to their contract, so to a certain extent they can do what they think is best for them rather than what is best for the sport.
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