Pirelli responded to drivers’ complaints about the quality of rain tires in Formula 1 and referred them back to their teams.
After Suzuka, we wondered once again why the sport always seemed so skittish about holding races in very wet conditions.
The finger was pointed straight at Pirelli, with Sebastian Vettel insisting the red flag was raised at Suzuka because the drivers were struggling with the intermediate tyres. But why not put on the rain?
“We are forced to go on the intermediates because the rain tires are crap – sorry, let’s say… not so good. The whole peloton was running on the wrong tyres.”
“We are all to blame for that but we have an intermediate which is so much faster than the wet tyre. The wet is better for these conditions but so slow you are forced to be on the other tyre. This needs to be improved .”
Max Verstappen agreed and even wanted to help Pirelli, explaining after the race that he would “very happy to do a few days of testing to try different types of tires because we need better wet tires. The full wet ones are just slow and they don’t really evacuate much more water.”
Pirelli F1 boss Mario Isola, however, says the main problem is that wet weather testing is now rare in Formula 1.
“We are only allowed one compound for the wet tires and one for the intermediates. And they have to work everywhere – on 22 different tracks. So we have to find the best compromise.”
“Honestly, we don’t have many opportunities to test wet and intermediate tyres. We work with the FIA and the teams, but if we don’t have the opportunity to test tyres, we don’t have either. the possibility of developing them.
And even when there are wet weather tests, Isola says the teams remain more focused on performance.
“If you remember the pre-season tests in Barcelona, we wet the track for half a day but the rain compound was used very little. The teams were focusing on the intermediates for performance. In this situation, we we can’t develop anything if the teams don’t play along on the rare occasions when we can work together.”