Pirelli responds to Lewis Hamilton tire complaints (2024)

Following the Miami Grand Prix earlier this season, seven-time Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton voiced significant frustrations over the current performance of Pirelli tires. Hamilton lamented nostalgically about earlier days when F1 tires permitted a broader working window, allowing drivers to better optimize car balance and maintain consistent grip throughout a lap. Now, Pirelli has responded to the 7-time champion's complaints

"Honestly, it's probably the most frustrating thing," Hamilton admitted.

"You look back in the day when you had a much bigger working window to work with," he continued. "Then you can just optimize the balance and then just have good grip throughout the whole lap. This is definitely my least favorite."

Responding to these critiques, Pirelli's F1 chief engineer, Simone Berra, offered a detailed technical explanation. Berra suggested that the fundamental characteristics of the tires haven't changed dramatically but acknowledged that the increased level of competition has made the tire performance window more pivotal.

"Every tyre has a peak at some point and the operating window is always just a definition. We take a certain percentage of grip loss to define the window," Berra explained.

"I think even in the past it was the same. But probably it was less critical because the level of detail that we have at the moment is quite significant," he added. "That's why now everything is highlighted and important. In the past, 15-20 years ago, you had cars or drivers even divided by half a second or seven-tenths of a second so it was not so narrow. But the fight now is completely different, and even one-tenth of a second makes a great difference."

He further explained that the variability in tire performance can depend significantly on the car setup and specific compound used.

"We know very well that especially C4, and in some cases obviously with high temperature the C5, there can be a peaky performance," Berra articulated. "Some teams are less able compared to others to extract the peak of performance. Part of it is the tyre, yes honestly it is, but part of it is as well, the car, the suspension, and how the car is, exploiting the compound performance. So, it's both factors."

Mario Isola, Pirelli's head of car racing and F1, delved deeper into the concept of tire grip and operational working range. Explaining in technical terms, Isola described how grip varies with temperature, stating that grip increases with temperature until it reaches a peak, beyond which it drops sharply due to overheating.

"If we look at a graph, the grip of the tyre is on the vertical coordinates and the temperature is on the horizontal," he explained. "In the cold, any compound that is developed for motorsport has little grip. Instead, the grip increases as the temperature goes up.

"There is a curve that goes up until it reaches a peak, and then beyond that there will be a significant drop in grip due to overheating," Isola noted. "Once the peak of grip has been reached, at the highest point of the curve, the graph normally shows us a 3% area that we define as the 'working range'. There is then a curve between two points that we try to make flatter and, above all, as wide as possible.

"Our goal is to give the drivers a tyre with a wide plateau, to ensure a bigger operating window."

The tire manufacturer is continuing to develop their products despite the unhappiness of some drivers. Just earlier last week, Pirelli revealed the idea of a new tire, the C6 compound, specifically engineered for the increasing number of street circuits on the F1 calendar by 2025. This softer tire option aims to adapt to the unique conditions of urban race tracks, enhancing performance, strategy, and therefore excitement for viewers. The C6 compound is designed to address challenges posed by street circuits, such as tighter turns and variable road surfaces, which can lead to quicker tire overheating. Mario Isola, Pirelli's Motorsport Director, highlighted that the C6 compound aims to manage tire overheating while maintaining necessary degradation for strategic variability in races.

"We collected quite a lot of good information—we finalized more or less the construction of the 2025 slick tires. We have very promising compounds to reduce overheating for 2025," he told RACER. "The idea is to also introduce a new C6 compound, a softer one, because in the calendar we have more and more street circuits and we need softer compounds."

Pirelli's development of the C6 compound began with extensive testing at the Paul Ricard circuit to finalize its construction for the 2025 season.

"So we are going to move the range a little bit on the soft side, always trying to reduce the overheating. The real problem is to find the right trade-off between overheating and degradation, because we need to keep degradation but reduce overheating. And that's not always easy because the two elements are connected."