Pirelli announced that they would be bringing the Medium and Hard compound tires to the Spanish Grand Prix as well as the Canadian Grand Prix and that has Lotus F1 technical chief, James Alison, convinced that the Italian tire maker is playing it conservative. Alison told Sky Sports F1:
“Pirelli look a few races ahead at a time and give us the compound selections for the next few races based on what they’ve learnt so far in the year.
“So for Barcelona, for the first time in a long time, we’re not taking hard and soft we’re taking hard and medium. We’re taking the same selection to Monaco that we normally do, soft and supersoft, but for Canada again we’re getting a medium when previously we would have expected a soft.
“So it’s going a bit more conservative. I think they’ve had a few people in their ear about maybe taking it a step too far and they’ve gone a bit more conservative than we might have expected.”
No surprise as some of the teams such as Red Bull, have been asking for a re-think and re-craft of the 2013 compounds due to high degradation rates and durability. Pirelli has been asked by Formula One to create a high degradation tire to add tactical elements to the racing but some teams feel this year’s compounds have gone a step too far.
As for Lotus F1, they would rather see the Soft compound as they were one of the few teams that seemed to excel on the yellow-marked tires. As some argue the tires are too progressive and impact F1 too much, other teams do well on them and this have given fans a two-sided argument for Pirelli to manage…change the tires to be more durable or leave them the way they are. A difficult position for Pirelli to be in and manage the expectations.
