Pirelli is warning of higher degradation despite Formula 1 teams stocking up on Soft tyres for the Australian Grand Prix.
This season will see the grid continue with the same spec rubber as used in 2019, after teams unanimously rejected the product Pirelli had created for this year.
To accommodate, the Italian supplier has had to take precautions by increasing the minimum pressures to cope with the extra speed of the new cars.
“The 2020 tyres had been designed to have less overheating or less degradation considering the increase in performance of the cars,” Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola explained via RaceFans.
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“Teams are aware of the fact that choosing 2019 [tyres] for another year means that we are obliged to increase the pressure and therefore they will find more overheating in 2020 compared to 2019 and also more degradation.
“They know that, they accepted that. This is my expectation.”
Another option open to Pirelli is to alter the compound selections for each race, but Isola admits that isn’t likely.
“Obviously, we can also work around the compound selection. If we want, in some cases, to reduce the overheating, we can, for example, nominate a harder selection,” he said.
“But considering that if I look back at the last year, we had many races where the selection was the right one – that means that all the three compounds have been used and we had different strategies – I’m not anticipating that we are going to change a lot of races. So most of them will be with the same compound selection or very similar.”
For the streets of Albert Park, Pirelli will take the middle three compounds, C2 (Hard), C3 (Medium) and C4 (Soft) to offer grip on the slippery track but also some durability with a large number of traction zones and medium-speed turns.
And the selections for each individual driver can be seen below:
