Hembery: Pirelli takes responsibility. Ecclestone keeps the faith

Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery has said today that the company is not seeking to shirk responsibility for the failures at Silverstone.

Mid week the company issued a report on the events of the British Grand Prix and appeared to be loading the blame onto the teams for misusing the tyres, which didn't go down too well among some of the teams.

Hembery later issued a personal note saying that he did not seek to blame the teams for what happened at Silverstone and today he has spelled out where he sees Pirelli's responsibilities lie.

"We take responsibility for underestimating the increase in performance of the cars, the loadings on the tyres at Silverstone were phenomenal," he said. "Two seconds a lap of jump is a huge amount in one year.

"And we were allowing the teams to swap the right tyres to the left and with the metallic belt that meant that you were creating a point when they were switched to the left, where the load was.

"So we had the issue that we had. The other issues in reality are secondary, but we are still analysing a lot of tyres from Silverstone.

"I don't want to take away from our responsibility, which is that we needed to have foreseen the situation better."

At Pirelli's request the FIA has sent out some mandatory figures for minimum tyre pressures and camber angles, to avoid teams doing anything extreme with the revised specification tyres.

In general the teams are obliged to run the tyres 1 PSI higher than the recommendation for Silverstone, so 20PSi is the minimum figure for when the tyre is up to temperature. This is several PSi higher than some of them have been running.

Meanwhile Bernie Ecclestone has told Gazzetta dello Sport today that he blames the teams for what happened with the tyres in Silverstone - due to their lack of ability to test - and says that he has faith in the Italian company for the future, expecting a new contract with them to be concluded soon, "Certainly, " he said. "There is no doubt about it."