15/07/2016
NEWS STORY
Pirelli believes pre-season testing for 2017 in the Middle East would prove more productive than Europe.
Along with the raft of new regulations aimed at making the cars faster and "more aggressive", Pirelli is going retro for 2017 with tyres that are wider and bigger to cope with the increased downforce loads.
While Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull are involved in the initial testing of the 2017 prototypes, it will be next year's pre-season tests that see all the teams get to run on the new rubber on the new cars for the first time.
With an eye on the notoriously inconsistent weather conditions in Europe, in February and March, even in Spain, Pirelli believes that pre-season testing should take place in the Middle East next year.
"We would prefer to go somewhere like Bahrain or Abu Dhabi," Pirelli Motorsport boss, Paul Hembery, told the official F1 website. "The temperatures will be representative and we know the tracks very well. We definitely would want to go to representative tracks."
With testing limited to three teams - Pat Symonds revealing that Williams didn't have the money to participate - there are fears that the rival eight teams will be disadvantaged.
"I don’t believe there will be any disadvantage," insists Hembery. "All the teams that are not testing have full data access to the results. And to make it clear, the three teams that are testing will not even know what they are testing, so we will end up mixing and matching the solutions so that even if they see something that is working well, it might not be the thing that they will get in 2017.
"The teams will just be testing blind, the data will be available to all the teams."
Asked if the tyres used in pre-season testing will be the final version, he admitted: "Normally yes, but if we have any surprises, if the cars then are very different to what we had envisioned, then we will have to react to that.
"Probably not for the first race," he continued, "but at least when we have some really good winter testing we should know in advance how it is likely going to be, what changes are needed.
"We will see a big reset next year and we will probably have to modify the compounds again for 2018 based on next year’s experience," he added."
While this year's pre-season testing was carried out exclusively at Barcelona, with some early wet testing at Paul Ricard, in 2014 the final two tests took place in Bahrain.