Pirelli F1 boss Paul Hembery has said that an aim of the new tyres for 2017 is to allow drivers to 'push harder' than with the current product.
The current Pirelli tyres have been deliberately designed to degrade in order to ensure multi-stop and variable races. But many drivers and fans have been critical of the need to 'nurse' the tyres through race stints, meaning drivers cannot drive at the limit of the car.
New wider tyres are to be introduced to F1 for next year as part of a variety of technical changes, and speaking exclusively to Grand Prix Times, Hembery confirmed that more durable tyres are being created for next season as part of the change.
"We hope so" said Hembery when asked if this was an aim. "From the testing we've done we feel that we're in an area of potential reduction, substantial reduction, in degradation".
Another area of criticism is that the current Pirelli tyres can overheat when a car follows in another's turbulence, which may make overtaking more difficult. Hembery added also that it is a "prime objective" for the 2017 tyres to be less sensitive on this. "That is an area we are looking at, to make the temperature sensitivity less, and that is one of the prime objectives" he said.
"We are trying to reduce the thermo-sensitivity. The idea is that at the moment there's quite a lot of turbulence from the wake from the car in front, that disturbs the area of your own car, and that then puts the tyre into a situation where it starts to over-heat.
"We're hoping as well to have less wake, so less disturbance to the air of following cars, combined with a tyre that's less thermo-sensitive, that packaged together will allow the drivers to push harder against the car in front. That's the theory."
Hembery confirmed too that these new aims were based in part on driver feedback: "The drivers wish to have something different, [this] is what was taken into account with this generation of product" he added.
But Hembery warned that even with current testing undertaken and scheduled, without actual 2017 cars it is hard to draw conclusions about the tyres in development. "In reality you won't understand the level that you've got until you get on a car that's very close to [that for 2017], because even if you get the aero loads right we're not going to get the engine that they're using now.
"We're clearly progressing rapidly along the development path, we don't have a lot of time, we don't actually have that many days' testing for this significance of the change that's happening. We're hopeful that the aero loads we see during these [forthcoming] tests will be higher than we saw in the initial tests.
"It's not easy for the teams, they've had to prepare a car in a very short space of time, and using a made up regulation in essence to try and replicate the downloads of next year's regulations. So it's a hard situation.
"The aero loads have a big impact on how the product works."
