11/01/2019
NEWS STORY
As Formula One's powers-that-be continue the hunt for the sport's holy grail, a set of regulations that will make each race more exciting than the last, with all twenty drivers in with a chance of a podium, and six or seven drivers battling for the title right up to the last race, seemingly nothing is off the table.
Aware that pit stops for tyres mean an additional opportunity for mistakes which can sometimes turn a race on its head, and concerned at the number of races that currently only require one stop, there has been talk of introducing mandatory stops in a bid to 'spice up the show'.
Pirelli, which will continue to be the sport's sole tyre supplier to F1 until 2023, is not in favour of the proposal.
"There was a lot of talk about imposing two stops by regulation," the Italian manufacturer's F1 boss Mario Isola tells Reuters. "I'm not sure that is the right solution because you have the risk of all the cars stopping on the same lap."
This season sees a change to the colour coding, which though introduced to make things easier for casual fans to understand, is already causing confusion as the three colours at each race (white, yellow and red) will cover the entire range of compounds meaning that the softest (red) at one circuit may well be the hardest (white) at another.
Already under orders to produce tyres that fit the sport's powers-that-be's concept of how the racing should be, Isola believes tyre should be more consistent in order to allow drivers to push harder.
"We want to be a bit more conservative because if we have one stop races anyway, at this point it's much better that we give drivers a bit more consistent tyres and they can push more and maybe we have a better show on track," he said, though he admits that providing tyres less susceptible to over-heating is still a problem. "We made some improvement on the product itself, we've different compounds in order to reduce the over-heating. But the over-heating is not avoidable when you follow another car and you lose a lot of downforce."
Looking ahead to 2021, when the sport switches from 13-inch wheel rims to 18-inch, he said: "We already started to design the new tyres because we cannot wait. The deadline was already in the past.
"What we can do is adapt the tyres, the design, to the new rules when they are available. But we need to know at least 80 - 90 percent of the expected performance of the cars as soon as possible... without that information it is really a challenge.
"We have two years in front of us before using the 18-inch tyres so it's important that we use this time in a good way. We cannot lose time but I believe we can do something good if we have the right process."
Isola revealed that the first part of this season will see Pirelli focussing on its 2020 tyres before turning its full attention to its 2021 rubber.
"We don't want to stop the development of the 2019 product because there is something more we can do and we know that," he said. "But for sure, the second half of 2019 will be dedicated to 18 inch tyres. I would say six months for 2020 and then we switch to 18 inches and dedicate 100 percent of the people to the new size and new challenge."