Italian tire company Pirelli responded to criticism after the Monaco Grand Prix when Sebastian Vettel said wet tires were too hard and ineffective.
We quoted an Aston Martin F1 driver who said he had a hard time driving these tires: “They are very slow. Not only is this rubber too hard for the track in Monaco, but in Imola it was exactly the same. Bad tires.”
Mario Isola, head of Pirelli’s racing division, is unwilling to agree with the four-time world champion, saying rain and intermediate tires are identical in stiffness.
“I think in Monaco the moment of transition from wet tires to intermediate tires was not the same as on other tracks,” said Isola. “We tested both types of rubber under similar conditions and at lower temperatures.
In short, it’s all about the properties of asphalt. Monaco is a real urban track with urban asphalt. Accordingly, the abrasiveness is much lower than that of asphalt, which is used on race tracks – therefore the grip of wet tires was much lower.
The composition of the rubber from which rain tires are made is different from that of intermediate tires, but the stiffness is not much higher. During testing, we saw that the performance of the wet tires was comparable to last year’s (13 inch), and we also wanted to make sure that the timing of transition from one type of rubber to another remained the same as last year.
In fact, Isola rejected Vettel’s claims, explaining the behavior of rubber by the specificities of the asphalt that covers the streets of the Mediterranean principality.
Source: F1 News
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