03/03/2011
NEWS STORY
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Mat Coch writes:
With just one test remaining before the season gets underway in Australia in three weeks time there remains concern over the speed with which the new Pirelli tyres are degrading. Pitpass revealed during the opening test in Valencia that tyre degradation was excessive, one correspondent amongst the inner sanctum suggesting "this is beyond degradation, this is destruction".
While many have taken high tyre wear to mean better racing there are others who are less convinced. Ferrari's Fernando Alonso has suggested the high wear rate and need for frequent pit stops will hurt the leading teams, while world champion Sebastian Vettel seems resigned to the fact he'll be heading to the pits at least three times a race. In Melbourne that equates to a stop every fourteen laps or so while at longer circuits such as Spa-Francorchamps it could see drivers pitting every ten laps.
That's of course assuming Vettel is correct, though there seems no reason to believe otherwise considering one leading team is splitting the tyre's side walls. At the last test in Barcelona tyres were degrading to such an extent circuit officials swept the circuit twice a day, once during the compulsory lunch break and again at night.
In Jerez pieces of tyre were retrieved not only from the roofs of the teams pit stands but high on the gantry which straddles the pit straight. In Barcelona rubber was found on access roads beyond the existing catch fencing designed to keep spectators safe from potential danger.
Marbles, which have been a feature of all pre-season tests so far, aren't new or even uncommon, but what is unusual is that even the straights were littered with them. Typically marbles are limited to the outside of corners, where the lateral load on the tyre rolls balls of rubber off their surface. That straights are littered with rubber is something altogether new.
More worrying still is the size of some of the marbles. Some have been so large the term 'marble' fails to adequately describe them, necessitating a new term, perhaps 'super marble'.
The sheer size of a super marble would suggest that rubber is building up on the cars before breaking free in larger clumps, some the size of an adult hand. One such super marble was retrieved from the main straight during the most recent test in Barcelona, Pitpass carrying images which clearly showed its unusual size and consistency.
Several cars have already fallen foul of these super marbles with wings and sidepods taking a battering, drivers frequently returning to the pits with their pristine paintwork caked in and battered by the Pirelli rubber.
If super marbles are capable of damaging cars one has to wonder what affect they could have on an individual, especially when Formula One reaches circuits such as Monaco or Singapore where fans are able to get much closer to the track.
It's also not inconceivable that a lump of tyre could be thrown from a car and strike another driver, in a similar manner to the way Felipe Massa's 2009 season ended when he was struck by a spring from Rubens Barrichello's Brawn. Such an occurrence would seem to be incredibly bad luck, but then again serious accidents usually are.
Interestingly the Grand Prix Drivers Association has remained silent on the situation. With its charter to champion for driver safety one would have expected some sort of comment or official position. Much like Bahrain, the silence is deafening.
Another factor is the mass the tyres are losing over a stint. During the course of a twenty lap run it's believed each tyre is losing somewhere in the region of 1.5kg in weight; by contrast the Bridgestone's used in 2010 were losing about a third of that. Such a dramatic drop in weight could well leave many of the teams sweating as their cars pull into parc ferme to be weighed as cars could be as much as 6kg lighter purely as a result of tyre degradation. Ironically, the Pirelli tyres are believed to be as much as 1.5kg lighter than the Bridgestone's to start with.
Reduced durability would also imply reduced running over a Grand Prix weekend. Issued with a set number of tyres at the start of the weekend it's a very real possibility that running on the Friday and Saturday of a Grand Prix weekend will be reduced, teams using only what they can afford to lose and saving as much fresh rubber for the race as possible. If a team is slow off the mark at the beginning of the season it's possible it will need to sacrifice race results and performance to develop their cars during practice in order to be more competitive later in the year. If Pirelli's product is only good enough for a quarter of a race distance, the days of running scrubbed or slightly worn tyres from practice are seemingly over.
The official line from Pirelli, and certainly one most media outlets seem happy with, is that the company has reacted to fans wishes for races where tyres become a deciding factor, many citing last year's Canadian Grand Prix where the Bridgestone tyres disintegrated. The resulting race was one of the most entertaining of the 2010 season, though more by luck than deliberate design.
Bridgestone, in that instance, were caught out. The wear rate was unexpected and the company was lucky the only fall-out was an entertaining race - should a tyre have failed and caused an accident the response would have been different. Worryingly, even if it is in the interest of spicing up the show, Pirelli appears to be deliberately adopting that approach.
Given the fall out after Indianapolis in 2005, when the Michelin-shod teams were forced to abandon the race when it became apparent the tyres couldn't sustain the loads being asked of them, Pirelli seems to have little to gain but a lot to lose. Furthermore, the inability to test in the extreme heat of Bahrain, where tyre wear is expected to be more of a factor, hasn't helped.