Romain Grosjean has questioned the decision to reduce blanket temperatures for rear tyres after the first day of testing.
Spins have been pretty common so far, with Alexander Albon repeating Kimi Raikkonen’s escapade from Day 1 and losing control during his out-lap on Tuesday, causing a red flag within the first minute.
And though conditions in Barcelona, particularly at 9am as Raikkonen noted, are not representative of the season to come, that didn’t stop Grosjean from complaining.
“We’ve got new tyre blanket temperatures, at 80 degrees, and when the track is four degrees, it just doesn’t work,” the Haas driver said. “In the afternoon it was still a struggle to get the first timed lap.
“I don’t really know why we went so low in blanket temperature, I don’t think it’s the right thing, and could be tricky on some occasions.
“We already know the Pirelli tyre has quite a narrow window and if we go out at 80 degrees behind the safety car, we’ll find ourselves at 50 quite quickly and that’s when it becomes tricky.”
Also Read:
Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola played down the Frenchman’s comments, however, pointing to how teams often tried to lower the tyre temperatures and pressures last year.
“We tested 80/80 in Abu Dhabi and the reasons we did that was to see if the warm-up was still acceptable,” he explained. “But the running pressures are a lot more in line with the starting pressure starting at 80 degrees.
“Talking to the teams, in general, they were worried about possible issues with the front warm up, because the front is a bit more tricky they had to put some energy on the front tyre.
“Nobody is worried about the rear tyres – last year we saw in a lot of races that the out-lap was very slow in order to keep the rear temp very low, or some teams were removing the blankets in advance in order to cool down the tyres, so we decided to go to 80 degrees.”