Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsLotus F1

Pirelli's Hungary choice 'conservative' - Grosjean

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Romain Grosjean says Pirelli has been conservative with its tyre compound choice for the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Pirelli has opted for the soft and medium compound tyre for the Hungaroring, despite its relatively similar characteristics to Monaco, where the soft and supersoft are used. While the allocation is the same as in 2014, Grosjean believes Pirelli should have opted for its softest compounds.

"We’ve gone well there in the past and it’s a track I like," Grosjean said. "The E23 works well and we seem to be able to extract pretty good performance from it at most tracks we visit. The Hungaroring is not a high speed circuit so it won’t play to the strength of our car through the speed traps, but we’ve worked pretty well in the low speed stuff.

"The tyre allocation of the soft and medium compound Pirelli is certainly quite a conservative one, but we should be able to go quite well. I think if we start the weekend well we could have quite a strong race and bag some more juicy points ahead of the summer break."

Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery says the compound choices are made with high temperatures in mind, with Hungary often one of the hottest races of the year.

"One of the biggest challenges is the weather: it can be extremely hot in Budapest in July, and obviously this has a significant effect on thermal degradation," Hembery said. "In order to find the right balance between performance and durability, we’ve selected the medium and soft tyres, which is the same nomination as last year.

"This selection is soft enough to provide the mechanical grip needed to negotiate all the corners, yet hard enough to withstand the punishing weather conditions and track layout of the Hungaroring."

Hembery has previously admitted to F1i the softest two compounds in the Pirelli range are proving too hard this season.

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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.