Doornbos: 'Flat Mercedes tires are probably caused by a high degree of downforce'
F1 News
- GPblog.com
With a relatively large number of punctures last weekend, several teams, but also Pirelli, are facing a challenge. This weekend a softer variant of the three types of tyres will be driven and the risk of flat tyres again will remain. At first many people thought that the flat tyres at Mercedes were due to the DAS system, but this is not correct in the eyes of Ziggo Sport analyst Robert Doornbos.
Pirelli has a megaproblem
In Crashen in de keuken, Doornbos says: "I think Pirelli has a megaproblem, that they need to sort it out in the next few days to solve it. Left front at Mercedes, at McLaren, both of them. Right back at Kvyat, but I think that's debris, because it was quite early in the race".
"At Mercedes, I've been thinking about it. Where did that come from? That DAS system, forget it. McLaren doesn't have that either, and that's minimal to warm up in the warm-up lap," with which Doornbos can exclude the much-discussed Mercedes system right away. So it has to be somewhere else.
"I think Mercedes is so ahead of the competition that they can drive more downforce than anyone else. They've got more downforce at all, so they're asking for more of the car, more of the tire. They lean more on that tire. And that they can't take that risk with such a long stint."
How the coming weekend will go will be very interesting. More pitstops seems a certainty, but Doornbos says it could also be that they will push each other less hard. Anyway, the upcoming Grand Prix will be a fascinating one from a tire perspective.