#F1: From Soft To Hard With Mystery Rubber But All Wet In The End
Pirelli announced a while ago that they will be bringing the PZERO SOFT (Yellow) and PZERO HARD (White) compounds to Silverstone. Each team will have at their disposal, six sets of hard and five sets of soft tyres.
Silverstone is the first non-street circuit in the last three races and thus might have been a great place to test Pirelli’s new mystery compound. Pirelli have indicated that they will provide teams with 2 sets of the new developmental hard compound for use on Friday (which I am calling the mystery rubber). It is understood that this new compound is to have a slightly longer and wider range, which in turn, should allow teams and drivers to make better use of them as they are less finicky to temperature.
A part of me wonders if this new development tyre is a sign of things to come from the Italian tyre maker. With some people complaining about the sudden drop off of performance, which drivers and pundits term “The Cliff” , this longer range may help silence some of the critics. The wider range of the new compound should please many, as it should be able to “wake up” the tyres and put them quickly into ideal operating temperatures.
I may be one of the very few that find tyre technology fascinating. I can’t hardly believe the effect tyres can have a race and race season. I’m absolutely loving the action this year thanks to Pirelli, even though I’m not a fan of the gimmicky DRS and KERS systems.
As interesting as all this sounds, there may be a very strong chance that we may only see the intermediate and full wet Pirelli PZERO Cinturato given the weather forecast for this weekend.
So Pirelli come to Silverstone with fist fulls of rubbers that range from Soft to Hard with some mystery magic in between but will most likely be nothing but wet in the end…
Author: Ernie Black
Twitter: Goggs_on_F1
Blog: http://thef1poet.wordpress.com
