With closer racing in 2012, as already witnessed at the season opening race in which the top eight cars in Q3 were covered by less than a second, tyre strategy will make the difference between winning or losing.
That’s the view of Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery.
The Italian supplier has worked hard to provide a tyre which lasts for 20 or so laps before rapidly losing grip, forcing a driver to change tyres at least twice during any given race.
With this in mind, paired with a closer racing pack, strategy will lean toward tyres being the determining factor between excelling and losing out.
“When it gets closer in the race, the management and the usage of the tyres by the driver will start to make a bigger difference to the result,” Hembery told the official F1 site.
“Ross Brawn [Mercedes team principal] has said a few times that this year the management of the tyres – because they are very aggressive – is a key for all the teams and drivers.
“This is what we had hoped by making them more aggressive,” he added. “Of course we did not want to make the differences in the compound too close together, because then they would have no strategy. We feel that we are close to having the right balance, as we have about half a second difference per lap between one compound and the other. If we can maintain this situation then this would lead to a very interesting challenge for the teams.”
