Pirelli insists Vettel tyre failure due to 'pure wear'

Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery insists Sebastian Vettel’s tyre failure in the Belgian Grand Prix was due to “pure wear”, and hints that Ferrari’s gamble to make the race a one-stopper did not work.

Having started from eighth on Pirelli’s softer compound, the German pitted for mediums on Lap 15 and tried to reach the chequered flag after Ferrari told him that “from the data, the tyres look pretty good to go to the end”.

Vettel then fought with Lotus’ Romain Grosjean for the final podium position until his right rear tyre suddenly went as the pair exited the daunting Eau Rouge corner on the penultimate lap.

Having done 28 laps on Pirelli’s white-walled rubber, the Ferrari ace was fuming over the failure after the race but Hembery claims the issue does not come from a manufacturing defect.

“It’s wear,” he said. “The end of wear life. When you do that, any tyre in the world that you have, when it gets to the end of its wear life you’re going to have a problem.”

“The wear life was indicated at around 40 laps but that’s an indication, race conditions can change that. Some factors involved in racing mean that’s sometimes not a precise data. Other teams were clearly taking it in a different direction.”

Asked whether the blow-out boiled down to Ferrari's bet not paying off, Hembery added: “That’s probably the easy way to say it at the end of the race, but that’s with hindsight. If the race had been one race less and you’d have said ‘what a genius move’, so that’s tough.

“We thought the strategy was going to be based on two or three stops, as you saw the majority did, but they clearly felt they could make it work on the one stop.”

Vettel’s late-race failure came in the wake of Nico Rosberg’s right rear tyre blow-out in FP2 and puts Pirelli under further pressure. Still, Hembery claims there are “absolutely” no similarities between the two incidents and repeats that the Italian products are not to blame.

“Rosberg was an external cut, this was pure wear.

“If you look at the images the actual carcass is actually intact – it was a wear issue, the second one, and Friday was a cut.”

Click here for Sunday's gallery of the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps. 

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