Pirelli will be reducing the number of compounds in its range as well as other changes for 2019, motorsport boss Mario Isola has confirmed.
This season, the Italian supplier produced seven different slick tyres ranging from the Superhard to the Hypersoft, next year, however, only five are expected to be used with the Superhard, which was never used, and the Supersoft dropped.
The move is part of Pirelli’s effort to improve strategic options after most races saw one-stop strategies with drivers simply running a slower pace to conserve the rubber.
“We had the Soft, Supersoft and Ultrasoft, they were too close,” said Isola. “So the Super no [longer] exists.
There will also be an overhaul of the naming system Pirelli use with the three tyres used at each race simply titled soft, medium and hard while the compounds will now get numbers, so the hardest available will be ‘one’ with the softest becoming number ‘five’.
“The compounds we are developing for next year have already a slightly bigger delta [performance gap] compared to this year,” Isola revealed. “The Soft tyre, now known as ‘three’, is unchanged.
“The Hard and the Medium performance is a bit better [than in 2018] because this year nobody was going to use the Hard because they believed it is not at the right level of performance.
“So we decided to move the Medium a bit closer to the Soft and the Hard is a bit closer to the Medium.”
At the other end of the spectrum, the compound known as the Hypersoft this season is also being overhauled for 2019.
“The Hypersoft is a new compound for next year with the same performance of the current Hypersoft because it’s in the right position, but we worked a bit more on the mechanical resistance of the compound in order to reduce the graining. That means that you keep the performance a bit longer.”
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Starting on Tuesday, the 10 F1 teams will get a chance to run the new Pirelli compounds in a two-day test in Abu Dhabi, gathering crucial data as they develop their 2019 cars and also providing information for the supplier.
Time is quite tight though, with the allocations for the Australian Grand Prix next March having to be given to the FIA by December 6th.
“With this range of compounds we cover all the 21 races for next year but it’s important that selection is the right one,” Isola said.
“So one/two/three, two/three/four, two/three/five, we have different possibilities. Obviously, all this is something that we can start planning when we have the result from the test.
“The result of the test is useful because the cars will have a lot of sensors to give us more data because they can compare 2018 to 2019 and we have all the range available.
“We have a lot of numbers, we have to analyse the numbers and come back by December 6th with a sensible proposal for next year.”
