Pirelli confirm tyre allocation for crucial first test 04 Feb 2013
Pirelli have confirmed that each car will be given 35 sets of tyres for the first pre-season test of 2013, which gets under way at Jerez in Spain on Tuesday.
In agreement with the teams, the Italian manufacturer will provide each car with one set of soft tyres, six sets of medium tyres, seven sets of hard tyres, three sets of intermediate tyres and three sets of wet tyres. The supersoft tyre will not be provided because of the particular characteristics of the Jerez circuit.
Once the teams have performed basic system checks on their new machines, the emphasis is expected to shift quickly to trying to understand the new Pirelli tyres.
“The teams will encounter tyres that are quite different to the ones they were used to last year, as every P Zero compound and construction has been changed, with softer compounds that allow more performance and a different construction that will place a bigger footprint on the track surface to enhance traction and grip,” commented Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery.
“This is one of the key aspects of Jerez, which should enable the teams to start to understand the nature of our new tyres by the time they go home on Thursday.”
However, speaking at the launch of Force India’s new car, the VJM06, last week, the team's technical director Andy Green said there are likely to be some limitations on how much the teams can ultimately learn about the tyres in testing because of the low ambient temperatures.
“We won’t really get an understanding of where they sit performance-wise, probably until we get somewhere hot,” he said. “I think winter testing is going to show us a small area of where they work, maybe in Jerez where it’s a bit warmer.
"Barcelona is going to be quite difficult to understand - we’ll have to artificially induce some scenarios into the tyres to see where they sit. It’s going to be our whole Barcelona testing, understanding the tyres.”
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