Formula 1 had a glimpse into the future on Thursday as Pirelli began testing the new 18-inch wheels coming for 2021.
At the final in-season test at Paul Ricard, running was split between Mercedes using the current tyres and Renault completing the first kilometres on the low-profile rubber.
Already, the Italian supplier has been working hard ahead of the introduction of the new wheels in F2 next year as part but this was the first chance to try them out on an upto-date F1 machine.
“It is the real first test with 18 inches tyres in a modified car, a new car,” Pirelli motorsport director Mario Isola explained via RaceFans. “So everything is new and there is a lot of question marks.
“But it’s important for us to start in September because at least we have time to react if we find any behaviour that was not predicted by our simulation.”
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The larger rims have been part of F1 plans for some time, with Lotus originally trialling them back in 2014 before their introduction was cancelled.
However, now the long-awaited change is guaranteed, Pirelli faces plenty of challenges to get the tyres ready.
“The main work will be on construction,” Isola said of the test objectives. “We start with a compound that is a baseline, something that we know because the first step is to define the construction.
“We cannot define the construction in one test but we start from a construction that is a known baseline. We have variants of the construction to test at the same test.
“It’s difficult to predict and we have no idea how many kilometres we will be able to achieve because it’s the first test. Usually we target 600, 650 kilometres per day on a normal 13 inches test. It is probably that for the first test on 18 inches will be less.”
The only minor change from the wheels used on Thursday and those for 2021 will be the addition of shrouds over the rims similar to those seen in 2007.
