Pirelli keen for warm weather pre-season testing

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Pirelli is keen to carry out pre-season testing at a warm weather venue such as in Bahrain to gain better data on its new tyres in 2017.

The 2017 regulations will see increased downforce levels as well as wider tyres in order to provide faster cars, with Pirelli already having started its tyre testing program at the beginning of this month. Motorsport boss Paul Hembery wants pre-season testing to take place in the Middle East - as it did in 2014 - in order to avoid potentially unrepresentative temperatures in Europe.

“We would love to but that’s out of our hands," Hembery told F1i when asked if pre-season testing could take place in Bahrain. "We have suggested that that’s what we’ll do but we will see what the teams decide.

“Cold temperatures could give limited data and we would obviously like to understand better where we are before we actually get in to a race.

"That’s something that would be ideal from our point of view and I would think from the teams point of view but there’s still a number of concerns regarding costs and the cost of replacing parts during a test period. So it might not yet happen.”

And Hembery says the new tyre sizes could lead to Pirelli supplying different versions of each compound next year, despite currently planning to stick with the five specifications ranging from ultrasoft to hard.

"It depends on which philosophies we use for different types of circuits and that’s something that we are simulating at the moment. If we carry on with the three compounds per race it’s how that would work with the circuits that we go to.

"If you can imagine the middle compound which might get used on a street circuit or vice versa there are sometimes street circuit compounds being used on the bigger circuits that maybe next year doesn’t quite work as well. So I think from a public’s point of view there will be five compounds.”

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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.