Pirelli motorsport chief Mario Isola admits his team is facing a minor headache ahead of Formula 1 pre-season testing, due to the recent resurfacing of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
The Spanish track has undergone several renovations in recent weeks as it looks to maintain its place on the MotoGP calendar with a new tarmac and expanded run off at Turn 13 just two of the changes made.
While the latter is irrelevant, the new surface is likely to play an interesting role in testing with grip levels to be very low initially around one of the hardest circuits on tyres that F1 visits.
“They [circuit officials] told me that the target is to make a tarmac that is similar in terms of roughness to the old one,” Isola told Motorsport.com. “[However], it is clear that it is not possible to have a new tarmac that is exactly the same.
“Usually we measure the tarmac roughness on Wednesday before each event. The idea now is that next week we send a couple of engineers to measure the tarmac to compare the old one with the new one.”
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Last year’s Spanish Grand Prix at the same circuit was the only race to see the hard compound used and with this year’s rubber more aggressive it would be expected to be used again, but Isola admits it is too early to tell.
“The problem is that maybe we need to reconsider the allocation because we select three compounds for each event depending on the tarmac roughness, layout and the energy that’s going through,” he said.
“Obviously if you have a complete change of Tarmac, like Sepang [in 2016] – they resurfaced the circuit and it was completely different from the past. [Before] Sepang was one of the most aggressive circuits and we had the opportunity to go one step softer after resurfacing.”
As for the potential impact on testing, which begins on February 26, he added: “It is probably true that the first day of testing, or maybe couple of days, there will be a lot of evolution but then we should have consistent conditions.”
