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Pirelli dismisses driver complaints over pressures

Pirelli says it will not react to driver complaints over its tyre pressures at the Belgian Grand Prix and will continue to follow its normal procedures.

Felipe Massa branded the high pressures as "a bit of a joke" as Pirelli imposed minimum pressures of 23.5 psi on the front and 22 psi on the rear at Spa-Francorchamps. A number of other drivers also complained about the pressures, with Carlos Sainz confirming it was raised in the driver briefing on Friday evening.

Tyre pressures are 'a bit of a joke' - Massa

Asked by F1i if it was discussed in the driver briefing, Sainz replied: "Yeah, for sure, because it’s too big.

"In all four tyres, even if you don’t flat-spot or nothing, you just find massive chunks of tyre coming out of the tyres. I think we’ve gone to one extreme now with these tyres pressures. The super-softs after two laps are undriveable … becomes like driving on an extreme wet on a dry track, like very, very, very slippery and not very comfortable, I would say.

However, Pirelli racing director Mario Isola says the tyre manufacturer will only respond to the data it has gathered on Friday and react accordingly.

“The procedure is the usual one, so we are receiving now the telemetry from the team’s and we compare with the simulation,” Isola said. “I have to say, it’s not a surprise for these teams to have these kinds of pressures here, because at the beginning of the year we decided to take some representative high-energy circuits – one of which was Spa – so they knew in February that the plan for Spa was to have around 23-24 psi front, and 22 rear.

“It was 24 psi and with the updated simulation we went down to 23.5, it’s not a big difference but it’s not higher than expected. Now we check with the usual system, the telemetry data. If we have room to do down, we go down.

“Maybe we have to increase if the severity of the telemetry is higher than the simulation… They have three hours to upload the data and we have three hours to analyse the data. So at 9.30 we are going to confirm or change prescriptions.”

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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.