Pirelli chief engineer Simone Berra summarised the results of Friday’s practice and qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix Sprint and said teams must pay attention to the problem of tyre overheating.
Simone Berra: “All in all a fairly normal Friday for a sprint weekend. During practice the teams worked on different programs, evaluating tires on segments of different duration and with different amounts of fuel in the tanks.
If we talk about the work of all three teams that came to this Grand Prix, there were no surprises from our side. As expected, there is no problem with granulation, but overheating remains an important factor.
The qualification for the sprint gave the opportunity to compare Medium and Soft under very similar conditions. The speed difference was about four tenths, which also corresponds to our expectations.
Half of the teams ran quite a long distance on hard tyres, which gives us reason to assume that they will use a strategy of two Medium-Hard-Medium pit stops. The other five teams, however, left the door open to using two hard kits or two medium kits.
It’s worth noting that today’s times were a few tenths slower than those of last year’s Friday qualifying session, under similar weather conditions.
With track temperatures expected to reach 40 degrees Celsius or higher on Saturday, the Medium tyre will be the preferred choice for all drivers, offering the opportunity to gather information that will be useful for Sunday’s race.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
