Simone Berra: Medium is the optimal choice for the sprint

Pirelli’s tire specialists noticed that hardly anyone worked with hard tires during training in Sao Paulo: the teams, preparing for the sprint qualifications, limited themselves to a series of laps on Medium and Soft tires. Only Aston Martin drivers came to the Hard circuit.

In the period between practice and sprint qualifying, temperatures dropped noticeably, affecting tire performance.

Simone Berrachief engineer of Pirelli Motorsport: “When working on a circuit where fresh asphalt has been laid, there are always many unknowns that need to be resolved, despite the fact that simulators are becoming more complex and sophisticated.

Even the historic circuit in Interlagos was no exception, where the surface was completely renovated. Thanks to our measurements the day before and today’s work on the track, we can draw some important conclusions.

The asphalt itself is very smooth and the abrasiveness has decreased significantly compared to last year. But there are still many bumps, which makes life difficult for teams and drivers.

As the cars completed more laps around the track, grip gradually increased, which was quite predictable. In addition, we saw that the temperature of the path can vary significantly, and this depends on the cloud density.

But it remains unclear what the grip on a wet track will be, but how important this is will become clear when the weather forecast for next weekend comes true. So far he promises a good chance of rain tomorrow afternoon, but on Sunday this chance is even greater and we have to be prepared for that.

When we talk about the behavior of rubber of different compounds and the way the teams work with it, we see that all teams have put aside two sets of hard tires for the rest of the weekend.

Medium tires will certainly be the optimal choice for the sprint, so we can predict that the race will be held on Sunday with two pit stops, the teams will use Medium and Hard, as was the case last year. But we have to remember that now in Sao Paulo they are using compounds that are a step softer than a year ago, which means that the current hard tires are last year’s Medium, and the 2024 Medium will be last year’s soft tires.

It’s hard to imagine anyone would take the risk of using C5 tires in a race, i.e. the current Soft, even if it showed well. But we have to analyze everything carefully and find out why soft tires did not allow us to improve noticeably in qualifying for the sprint. However, the best time of the day, shown by Oscar Piastri, is still 1.723 seconds better than the time of last year’s pole position, Lando Norris.”