Pirelli ready to meet drivers’ tyre demands

F1 Fanatic Round-up

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In the round-up: Pirelli say they will provide tyres designed primarily for performance instead of degradation if requested to do so by Formula One Management.

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Some of yesterday's fun leaving the garage 🤗 #driftcity

A video posted by Daniel Ricciardo (@danielricciardo) on

Comment of the day

Thoughts on the upcoming fight for supremacy and survival between Haas and Manor:

It is necessary to be in the top ten for two out of the previous three years in order to get any sort of payout from FOM. So Manor is safe until the end of 2017.

However, Haas’ funds mean that Manor’s job can be expected to get progressively more difficult (continued participation of other teams permitting) as time goes on. So now is the time to be getting good people into the right places, because this is the best chance they will have of integrating into the squad in time to protect Manor’s position in 2017 and beyond.
@Alianora-la-canta

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On this day in F1

The first race of what was called the Indy Racing League was held 20 years ago today in the aftermath of the split from the CART series. Buzz Calkins won at Walt Disney World, which closed in August last year. Ex-F1 drivers Michele Alboreto and Eddie Cheever finished fourth and tenth respectively.

Watch the race in full via IndyCar’s YouTube channel:

Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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24 comments on “Pirelli ready to meet drivers’ tyre demands”

  1. Sarrazin’s story shows how many talented drivers miss F1 because a vast number of things get in the way. From Kristensen, to Franchitti, from Lotterer to Gonchi Rodriguez. Never mind those that made it and failed for whatever reason after showing so much promise.

    You have to be really darn lucky to get there and get things your way so you actually make a difference. This sport is really cruel.

    1. BAT-run Tyrrell had Ricardo Rosset at his worst, and an opportunity to replace him with Kristensen, and they decided to keep Rosset.

      Jaguar had a young Andre Lotterer in their junior programme and they decided to pair Mark Webber with not him. Dale Coyne Racing had a young Andre Lotterer in for one race in 2002 and the next year he went with six other sub-par drivers that weren’t him.

      1. @rjoconnell I remember talking to a Tyrrell engineer in late 1998 about why Rosset was struggling as much as he was that season & he came back & said that he simply couldn’t get to grips with how twitchy & unpredictable the 1998 spec cars were.

        While Rosset was never a great driver that was ever going to score podiums, wins or championships in F1 during his pre-F1 career & indeed while he was at Arrows in 1996 he was at least fairly quick (Very quick on occasions in F3/F3000) & didn’t look out of his depth as he did in 1998.

        1. Mr Win or Lose
          27th January 2016, 8:24

          He was quite slow in 1996 too. He got soundly beaten by Max Verstappen’s dad in every qualifying session (and in the races if not for horrible reliability). I believe his problem was that he was always braking way too early.

      2. @rjoconnell, to be fair to Jaguar, when they chose to sign Pizzonia over Lotterer, they chose to do so because Pizzonia was the faster driver of the two when they both tested for Jaguar.

        Asides from that, Pizzonia was highly regarded by multiple figures in the paddock at the time – Berger personally recommended him to Lauda (who was working for Jaguar at the time), whilst Frank Williams also spoke extremely highly of his technical abilities after working for Williams as a test driver. It may look like the wrong decision in retrospect, but at the time people didn’t necessarily think that Jaguar were making a mistake by hiring Pizzonia over Lotterer.

    2. @fer-no65 On that note, spare a thought for Vincenzo Sospiri! Not to mention Jason Watt, whose accident presented a golden opportunity to Jenson Button.

  2. Regarding the ‘This day in F1’ video about the 1st IRL race in 1996….. I was there.

    It was a very strange atmosphere as you had some excitement about there been a new series that would run on some new tracks & give some new teams/drivers opportunities that CART were unwilling to provide… But at the same time everybody knew that it was damaging the sport & that what was happening really shouldn’t be happening.

    I actually seem to recall that right up until that 1st weekend you had some of the teams & drivers that were signed upto the IRL questioning if it would even go ahead because while they had signed upto it a lot of them were quietly hoping that everyone would get together & sort something out.
    Even though there were 2 IRL races before Indy it wasn’t actually until we got to the 500 in May & you had the CART teams/drivers in Michigan with the IRL guys at Indy with the announcement that the IRL would have a completely different formula for 1997 that it finally sunk in that the split was real & for the short term there woudl be no getting back together because a lot of stuff was said in the media which just caused the 2 sides to move further apart.

    My last memory of that mess before I moved to Europe was sitting in the TV truck at Indy seeing the massive crash at the end of the race having just seen the mess at the start of CART’s US-500 (We had that race on in the truck) & thinking to myself that all of the wreckage sitting all over the tracks was a good indication of where open wheel racing in North America was going.

    1. Wow I’m very impressed you were actually there! I can see why it would have been very bittersweet being there. So sad that it all actually happened, I still can’t believe it did and I’m stunned that it was now 20 years ago! How did that happen?!

      I took a passenger ride in a NASCAR round the Disney Oval a couple of years ago, it was AWESOME. Gave me a completely new appreciation of NASCAR drivers. The car was moving about so much in the corners, it felt like being in a sweltering hot washing machine, and I realised I wasn’t breathing through the turns. And this was one car lapping on it’s own over 3 laps, I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in a 2 hour race with 40-odd cars around you.

      1. @unicron2002 I drove one of the ‘Richard Petty Experience’ NASCARs around that oval about 10 years ago. My overwhelming memory is of the unbelievable power and traction pulling out of the pits but almost as soon as you were in 4th gear on the oval they held you back to a maximum of about 120mph which was far too slow for such a straightforward circuit – I had driven as fast on a public road! Unfortunately the experience was designed to be idiot-proof (several of the other drivers there had to be instructed on the clutch and “stick-shift”) and for someone who has done a bit of karting and driving before was a serious disappointment.

  3. FlyingLobster27
    27th January 2016, 7:11

    Last minute: Rubens Barrichello has signed up with Wayne Taylor Racing to take part in the Daytona 24 Hours this weekend. The Sportscar365 article reminds us that this is Rubens’s third participation since 2013, but the first in a front-running Corvette DP.

  4. WilliamB (@william-brierty)
    27th January 2016, 8:26

    No offence to Pietro or to Vaxivere, but the driver calibre in FV8 3.5 is not yet good enough to warrant my attention in 2016…

    With one vindictive move, the FIA has all but killed of a once great series that has arguably supplied a more consistent stream of junior talent than GP2. But with the absurd super-license system, GP2 has regained a monopoly of the best young talent…

    1. Agreed @william-brierty, it’s a disgrace.

  5. How many spelling errors are in that independent article!

  6. Sorry if this doesn’t make sense to anyone… but in regards to the comments about aero vs mechanical by Senna etc. I think (as an aerodynamicist myself) that the mandatory use of regulated boundary layer trips along the leading edges of the suction surfaces on all wings/downforce-generating devices would significantly reduce the gap between design and off-design aero performance by widening the operating window between quiescent and “dirty-air” operating conditions.
    At the moment all of the teams use the multiple sub-chord approach (multiple wing elements) on the front wing to re-energise the boundary layer on the surfaces exposed to adverse streamwise pressure gradients of the respective element downstream, such that they can run good peak downforce. However, with higher freestream turbulence upstream (“dirty air”) this solution gets knocked badly out of whack and it’s hard to follow the car in front.

    Anyway, that’s my two pennies worth.

    1. And two bright shiny pennies they are!

      Your solution to operating in dirty air seems reasonable and a worthwhile tradeoff to the current methods. Assume the tradeoff is that the performance in clean air would not be as optimum as the multiple sub-chord technique.

      This sounds like a brilliant concept for a mid-field team to try. The leading teams would never need to, because they’re always leading. ;-)

    2. I had to read it twice, but what you are saying is – less wings, better racing?

  7. Wonderful. F1 is introducing a safety device that would have protected an IndyCar driver and a Formula 2 driver.

    Of course, it wouldn’t have helped either of the last two F1 drivers to suffer a head injury, and F1 doesn’t even *have* the type of part that killed Justin Wilson (a heavy, metal-reinforced nose cone, as I understand it).

    Whether it would have helped Henry Surtees or not, I don’t really know– 29 kg @ 162 km/h sounds like something a simple halo can’t do more than mildly deflect or slow down.

    This seems like a feel-good committee compromise that exists to show “we’re doing something!” without doing anything actually meaningful.

    1. It does feel like a knee-jerk “we must do something” move, and that worries me, because if there is one area the FIA is usually anything but knee-jerk in, it is safety improvements. I’m hoping this is a mere coincidence of timing and that the cockpit rims are ready for implementation, otherwise this will either put something that isn’t ready on the cars (and possibly impede safety), or get shouted down by the teams for being an immature technology (thus impeding the acceptance of future mature technologies that could aid safety – especially if the cockpit rims eventually become such a technology).

      1. @alianora-la-canta, the FIA has been experimenting with a range of different cockpit protection measures for several years now (getting on for around 4-5 years now), but it has proven challenging for them to find a solution that meets with the approval of the drivers, teams and circuit medical staff.

        In the past, the FIA has met with resistance to the idea of a fully enclosed cockpit – questions have been raised about how quickly the cockpit could be removed, along with questions about visibility and distortion effects (in LMP cars, which tend to have pronounced curves in the windows, drivers have mentioned slight issues with the curved windows causing slight image distortion).

        That has pushed them towards a partially enclosed solution instead, such as the proposed cockpit rims. Now, in this instance the cockpit rims has come from Mercedes as part of an initiative pushing the teams to come up with solutions, so you would assume that there might be more support from the teams for this type of design. Equally, the GPDA seem to believe that the tests undertaken on this particular design seem to have demonstrated that it is effective, so presumably they are likely to push for this option as much as they can.

  8. Thank you for the Comment of the Day award, Keith :)

  9. If we had to produce long-lasting tyres we have to focus on that, if we have to produce tyres with degradation we have to focus on that.

    There is an old saying, “The customer is always right!”. It isn’t completely true, but they are the one with the money. Pirelli have a contract, so I would expect them to supply the tyres stated in the contract.

  10. Yeah All we need now is Bernie to give all go for different tire philosophy… and away we go! :D

  11. I don’t care about Pirelli or Formula E.

  12. Pirelli won’t improve the performance. They can’t do this.

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