Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has hailed the added excitement from the Pirelli tyres during the Malaysian Grand Prix.
The Italian company was asked to create higher degrading tyres which would increase the amount of stops from an average of one during 2010, to three this season.
Whilst that wasn’t the case in Australia, the majority doing two stoppers, the higher temperatures in Sepang saw most doing three and a handful completing four.
Horner admitted that it turned what could have been a processional dry race into a topsy-turvy grand prix which included over 55 overtaking moves, triple the average for Sepang.
“It does add an exciting dimension to the race,” he said.
“It’s certainly complicated on the pit wall!. It would be an air traffic controller’s nightmare if you were tuned in to the strategy channel, because you’re trying to look at where you’re going to emerge [after pit stops], what the degradation is, what tyre you should be using, all with two cars – so the work rate is colossal.
“I think you have to be flexible, we didn’t know whether it was going to be a three, four or five-stop race. I think you have to go into the race with the flexibility to change. It was pretty intense from start to finish for us.”
Whilst he is yet to watch the whole race from a spectator view, opting to concentrate in his two drivers during Sunday’s event, he is certain the amount of overtaking and the close racing can only be a good thing.
“I’m not the right person to comment on that because you become so immersed in your own race that you don’t look at the race as a whole.
“But you’ve got people racing each other – you’ve got [Fernando] Alonso and [Lewis] Hamilton going wheel to wheel, you’ve got Mark [Webber] managing to have a bad first lap and come back through, so I think that’s got to be a positive for Formula 1 in what could have otherwise been quite a static race.”
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