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Pirelli: F1 Won't 'Fully Understand' Compounds Until Midseason

20:15, 17 Mar 2018

byNicolás Quarles van Ufford

Pirelli sporting director Mario Isola thinks that the teams won't be able to fully understand the new compounds until halfway through the season.

The tyre-manufacturer have added two brand new compounds two their range for the F1 teams; the 'hypersofts' and the 'superhards'. What Pirelli essentially did, is making all tyres two steps softer, after the company got criticized for being too conservative in their approach last year.

“I am sure there are some details we don't know because the compounds are more or less all new, except for the medium," Isola said. "The medium is just the soft from last year."

"We already designed the soft, supersoft and ultrasoft. The hypersoft is completely new. We had a test last year in Abu Dhabi, we had a test here [in Barcelona] but you can't say that you know any detail of any compound after just two tests."

“The hyper soft is a compound which we still need to figure out when we can use it. It was also very important to confirm the delta lap time here, because in Abu Dhabi we had completely different conditions, a different circuit layout and different circuit roughness."

“So we have to understand and collect more data. I think that we'll really start to understand the compounds by mid-season at best. Before that there's a pretty big learning curve.”

This could mean that the team that figures out the tyres better than everyone else after analysing their data at pre-season testing, could gain a significant advantage early-on in the season.