Pirelli resorts to new sim software to shake up tyre strategies

Pirelli is relying on special software to help determine its tyre selections this year in a bid to offer teams more control over their pit stop strategies.

F1's exclusive tyre supplier has increased its range of compounds this season and gone one step softer across the board with a less conservative approach.

Teams will still be allocated three compounds at each race but Pirelli's selections won't necessarily include a logical sequence of tyres, meaning the manufacturer could jump a compound in its selection.

"We have now a very good tool, software that we created this winter, to make all the combinations with three different compounds," said Pirelli F1 boss Mario Isola.

"And the software is returning the number of strategies in a certain interval of race time.

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"So we always pick up the three compounds that have the highest number of strategies. Usually of course the target is two stops, but it's not only two stops, we are taking the combination which on paper is giving us the higher number of strategies, to try to have more action on track.

"Software is a tool that is making a lot of comparisons in a quick way, but you need to put in the right numbers," adds Isola.

"If we collect good numbers from here, we can update the software in order to have new simulations and to decide the selection.

"We had a different system. We had one in the past, but now we have a new one that is considering more information.

"We have I feel a better, more representative output. The model is stronger, it's more solid."

According to Pirelli, the delta between the various compounds over a single lap will determine if a selection jumps a tyre or not.

The lower the delta, the higher the chances a specific type of rubber will be omitted in favour of the next one in the sequence.

"If we discover for example that soft, supersoft and ultrasoft are too close, we can nominate, as we did for China, where we did medium, soft and ultrasoft," explains Isola.

"It's important that we collect the delta laptimes between compounds to decide the selection.

"If we confirm the numbers that we have seen in Abu Dhabi [testing in November] – between soft and supersoft we had 0.6s, and supersoft to ultrasoft was 0.4 s – depending on that, we can fine tune the selection and try to choose the best combination."

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