When analysing the results of the first practice sessions at Silverstone, Pirelli’s tyre engineers noted that Lando Norris’ time, who topped the Friday protocol, was 0.171 seconds better than Max Verstappen’s pole position last year.
In short, the teams, looking for race settings, worked on the track on medium and soft tyres. In the first session, hard rubber was mainly used.
Simone Berra, Chief Engineer of Pirelli Motorsport: “The most interesting conclusion that can be drawn today is that the lap times are much better than a year ago. Just mentioning one fact is enough: Norris, on his best lap, showed a time that was almost two tenths faster than Verstappen’s pole position last year.
Unless there is rain during qualifying, we can expect the pole time to be well above 1:26.1, which is the average result based on the teams’ pre-race simulator work.
The conditions are certainly having a noticeable impact, with the weather now cooler than in 2023. But it must also be stressed that Silverstone is where the true potential of the 2024 cars is better expressed than at any other circuit.
After an initial analysis of the information collected during two hours of training, we can say that the difference between the compositions is about the same as two weeks ago in Barcelona: about half a second between Hard and Medium and just over a second between Medium and Soft.
It seems that the hard tyre is working better compared to last year – this applies both to the pace over a long series of laps and to the maximum speed. Therefore it would be more appropriate to use it in the race than the soft, which suffered to some extent from the degradation today.”
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.
