05/07/2013
NEWS STORY
Confident that the tyre issue is on its way to being under control, Pirelli's Paul Hembery, admitting that the situation is the company's responsibility, says the Italian manufacturer has no intention of walking away from F1.
"We need to get it sorted," he told journalists at the Nurburgring this morning, "and the best way to react is do it properly and get things sorted and get things back on line.
"We are a professional company," he continued. "We are very passionate about what we do and very good at what we do. You don't walk away in difficult times, that's the time to work harder and make sure you do a better job."
Asked about the GPDA's threat of a boycott should there be any reoccurrences of the carnage witnessed at Silverstone, Hembery admitted he was surprised by the drivers' union's threat.
"It was a little bit surprising having just had a meeting with them going through it," he said. "At the end of the day we have to make sure we don't have any issues like we had at Silverstone. That's the bottom line."
While some still insist that the results of Pirelli's own investigation into the Silverstone failures is a deliberate attempt to put the blame on others, most notably the teams, Hembery made it clear that this is not the case.
"Last weekend was our responsibility," he said. "We allowed the teams to invert the tyres when we shouldn't have done. With the cars going much quicker this year that creates different loads. With the inverted tyres you create a weakness point, and that was the issue. There were secondary issues, which have been mentioned, but I don't want to take away from the fact it was our responsibility."