In the round-up: Formula One’s official tyre supplier Pirelli is considering more non-consecutive tyre selections having been pleased with their choice for the Chinese Grand Prix.
Pirelli sporting director Mario Isola explained why they chose the medium, soft and ultra-soft tyres in China, skipping the super-soft:
When we selected the tyres for China we had the information coming mainly from [the] Abu Dhabi [test] because it was in January. Based on that number we saw that soft, super-[soft] and ultra-[soft] were very close. We had 0.3 [seconds] and 0.4, something like that.
So we said we can make a selection where we don’t choose one level and we jump. In that case if they’re really close we should have a delta lap time between soft and ultra that is in the range of 0.7, that is the same range we saw with medium [to] soft, obviously with higher degradation. So we should create the right crossover to have different strategies, that was the approach
If we look at what happened in Bahrain, soft and super-soft were not so close. This is part of the experience we are collecting. All these numbers we are collecting from races we put into our system to make even better selections for the next events. That could mean jumping one level or not.
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