Mario Isola: The weather remains an uncertain factor

After searching through its archives, Pirelli discovered that the weather conditions at Silverstone during the third practice session were among the coldest since 2011, when the Italian tyre manufacturer became the monopoly supplier of rubber to the World Championship teams.

When the highway works started on Saturday, the air temperature was 11 degrees, the asphalt 13 degrees. Only in Turkey in 2020 was it colder (air +10C, asphalt +11C). In addition, it was raining and a strong wind was blowing, and under these conditions it was not easy to warm up the intermediate tires.

The situation had changed somewhat during qualifying, making it possible to switch to slicks already during the first session,

Mario IsolaHead of Pirelli Racing Division: “The qualifying followed an exciting scenario and the results were very pleasing for the fans in the grandstands of the circuit, as the first three results were shown by British racers.

The conditions in which the battle for pole took place were quite similar to the weather that accompanied last year’s qualifying, but we saw that the lap times were about a second better.

This suggests that the cars are becoming more efficient every year, although the tyres remained more or less the same as those available to the teams at Silverstone in 2023. And when you consider that the grip levels were certainly not optimal after the rain that poured down all day, it is obvious that the cars were capable of higher speeds!

Tomorrow’s weather remains a major uncertainty. The forecast is for continued rain and the track will be as wet as during the third practice. In this case, all teams will have enough sets of intermediate and heavy rain tyres to cover the distance with two pit stops.

However, if it is still dry, calculations suggest that the optimum tactic will be one pit stop, with teams able to choose slicks from all three compounds. The Soft/Medium option seems slightly quicker than starting on Soft and running the second part of the distance on Hard, but if you opt for a tactical scheme that excludes soft tyres, you can be more flexible.”