Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsPirelli

Pirelli admits softest compounds too hard

Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery has told F1i he feels the 2015 soft and supersoft compounds are proving to be too hard.

The Canadian Grand Prix saw only Ferrari opt to stop twice in the race for strategic reasons, with the rest of the field - apart from Romain Grosjean and Will Stevens who collided - stopping once despite the softest compounds being nominated.

Speaking exclusively to F1i, when asked if the Canadian Grand Prix had shown the softest compounds to not be soft enough, Hembery replied: “Yeah, that’s probably fair enough.

“The brief has always been two to three pit stops and this has been clearly a one and only a little bit of two stop. From that point of view it’s a little bit off target.

“It’s a tough one. When you’ve got four compounds to try and cover the full season, getting it perfect every time is not as easy as it might seem. We’ll maybe have to look at that. Maybe not for this season but for next year it’s something that we’ll take in to account.”

And Hembery says part of the problem comes from the necessity to finalise compounds pre-season despite limited testing, with Pirelli relying on data for much of its planning.

“When you shoot wide of the mark and end up a one and two stop, you’ve only got to change by maybe five laps and you’re probably back on a two stop. So it’s actually quite a fine line you’re aiming at. It certainly seems that where we’re at this year and the way the cars are using the tyres this year, they’re using them much better and getting much lower levels of wear and degradation. That’s not what we were anticipating.

“We were given a lot of data before the start of the season which suggested the pace of the cars this season would be significantly improved. We haven’t really seen what we saw in winter testing. Melbourne suggested we were in that area and after Melbourne things have calmed down a bit, so that’s a little bit of a surprise. We expected the cars would be going quicker by now.”

Click here for the latest photos from the Canadian Grand Prix

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.