Paul Hembery Q&A: F1's tyre debate
With tyres F1's current buzzword, Pirelli's motorsport boss spoke to Sky Sports F1's Simon Lazenby and Johnny Herbert in Bahrain to set the record straight
Friday 19 April 2013 11:18, UK
Simon Lazenby: Lot of talk about tyres at the moment. Let's just start with decisions here and your decision to switch the compounds after Malaysia....
SL: The degradation in China on the softs was not much less than a second a lap. Was it too much?PH: "Well we intended that really to be almost like a qualy tyre. They need to use it to get the time and then you found at the start of the race they had to pit early. The hope there was that more of the Q2 teams would take the harder option, they didn't actually and we were surprised by that because that would have enabled them to gain position on the circuit and that would have made it more interesting as the Q3 came charging through. "So that was the idea - it wasn't intended really as a race proposition." SL: Everyone's in it together, we all want to see good racing, how do you go about developing your compounds for the season now. Are there little tweaks and adjustments as we get into Europe?
PH: We'll do a review actually after the race here on Sunday night and we'll probably decide what we're going to do Monday, Tuesday before we get to Spain. "You've got to be careful because if you make changes during the season...say for example we make a change and one or two teams suddenly made a big jump forward, you'll be now be asking me 'you've just favoured a few other people'. So you're in a bit of a no-win situation and you've got to be really careful because if that does happen you are influencing the championship. If we make changes we've got to make it early on - you don't want to do it after eight or nine races because again that's going to favour probably one or two teams. "Also bear in mind we were having the same conversations last year and by the end of the year nobody was talking about it. The teams have the best engineers in the world, the drivers are there at the top for good reason, they are intelligent people and work out how to get the best out of the package. You'll see the same as we go forward." SL: Lewis Hamilton's saying he's having to change his technique and learn new techniques as a driver this year. I don't know if that's a suggestion that he used to be able to push coming out of the pits for a couple of laps and actually he's having to hold off now. Is that a technique or is that a strategy?
PH: "Kimi in Melbourne was probably a good example: in his final stint you saw him come out and he was being chased down at the rate of one and a half seconds and he did a couple of laps quite calmly and then he started going away and setting the fastest laps of the race. That was really about him trying to make sure he gets into the stint in the right manner. "Bear in mind as well now that we're in the more extreme races - we're certainly not going to see this temperature at Silverstone are we! We're at 50+ track temperature and for the majority of the season you won't see that, it runs at around 25 degrees. So you're probably pushing the levels of degradation more here which probably explains why the end of each season we talk less [about the tyres] because the types of tracks we have, the surfaces are a lot less aggressive."
