Pirelli predict overheating tyres in 2020

Jamie Woodhouse
Pirelli-red-2019-tyres-PA

F1 teams voted to stick with the 2019 compounds for this year, and Pirelli fear that could lead to the tyres overheating more than before.

Stable regulations from 2019 to 2020 mean that the cars will likely only get faster as teams develop and find ways to extract more performance.

But this will put the Pirelli tyres under more pressure, and for this reason the Italian company say more overheating is the only strong prediction they can make for the upcoming campaign.

“In a condition of consistent technical regulation, because the technical regulations for this year is no different compared to last year, the rate of development is measuring 1 second to 1.5s per lap,” Pirelli’s motorsport boss Mario Isola told Motorsport.com.

“In one season [that is] the improvement in laptime. So, I can expect that we have another step in 2020.

“That means some more downforce, that means more energy. Probably, if we have to predict something, it could be more overheating, maybe.

“[That could be] more of a thing because of the additional energy that is going into the tyre.”

But Isola, who was speaking at Autosport International 2020, did give a positive to the situation, that being the fact that teams should struggle less with warming the tyres up in 2020.

“If you remember at the beginning of the [2019] season, some teams were complaining about warm up and in some occasions, it was a bit difficult to warm up the tyres,” he said.

“That is not going to be an issue for this year. They know the tyres, so the advantage compared to last year is that the learning curve on how to use a new product is already there.

“So there is no learning curve for the tyres this year.”

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