Hembery wants 'the cliff' back for tyres

Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery has said that he wants to see a return to the days when tyres would abruptly fall 'off the cliff' in terms of performance if pushed too far during a race.

"We'd love to bring back a proper 'cliff'", he told reporters last week at Interlagos. "If we can engineer that in - I don't know if we're going to have enough opportunity to get a solution that works perfectly during the Abu Dhabi test."

Pirelli has been granted a 12-hour closed-door tyre test scheduled at Yas Marina Circuit for the Tuesday following the final Formula One Grand Prix of 2015. All teams will attend the test, running one car each, but they "will not be allowed to try new parts nor alter the cars in any way during the test," the company has stressed.

"We've got a couple of ideas," Hembery continued. "I'll know after Abu Dhabi whether it's worked or not.

"The ideal situation would be to have a 'cliff' back so we can get back to two or three stops rather than pushing the stint lengths as we've had as a tendency of the last two years.

"It would be a compounding thing, something that we're looking at," Hembery continued. "It's things maybe we can do inside the tyre to try and create a kind of 'cliff' which could be a chemically-engineered one, so that it becomes unbeneficial to stay out for longer stints.

"If there's one input we've had it's that they [the teams] really want to get back to two or three stops rather than the predominant one stop racing we've had this year."

The introduction of an even softer compound option beyond the existing supersofts is one aspect of that plan, specifically intended for use street circuits.

"What we're trying to achieve there is obviously a tyre for street circuits because at the moment we know they tend to be one stop races," he said.

"Hopefully bringing in a extreme softer tyre will allow us to get up to at least two stops. So you're going to see that at Singapore, Monaco - you could probably even think about taking it to Melbourne."

However, Pirelli needs to ensure that in seeking to shorten the tyre life and introduce a definite 'end of life' tipping point to its race performance it doesn't compromise the safety of the tyres in the process.

"We continuing on further improvements in product integrity," Hembery insisted. "The cars are going to get quicker next year so that's obviously something you want to keep an eye on."

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