Pirelli confirms doubts over new tyres planned for Malaysia

Pirelli had promised teams that the revised tyres would be “transparent,” meaning that the change – designed to improve impact resistance from kerbs and so on – would have no impact on performance.

However, some teams discovered in Belgium that there was a significant impact on how the tyres behaved, suggesting that it will be unlikely that all 11 entrants will now agree to the change for Malaysia.

“In Spa we had feedback that was not aligned,” said Pirelli technical boss Mario Isola. “It was already planned to have the double test, in Spa and Monza, mainly because at Spa the weather is always a question mark. From Spa [there were] two main areas.

"One was the pulling, because considering the construction we were expecting pulling on the left from the rear tyre, so we wanted to investigate this effect on the car. We had some cars that felt the effect, and some cars not.

“The other strange behaviour that was reported from Spa was a loss of grip, so a bit less grip compared to the current soft specification.

"This is really strange, I have to say, because it is a change in the construction, but the compound is exactly the same. So we are collecting the feedback from the [Monza] test, and of course we send back all the tyres from Monza and Spa in our laboratories to analyse the tyres.

“When we have the summary of all this investigation we will see and we will prepare a report to the FIA to decide how to proceed.

"Of course we need to be quite quick in this, because the plan is that if the prototype is we want to introduce it in Sepang, but this means that we need to produce and deliver and ship the tyre to Sepang. So we need to conclude this analysis quite quickly, and decide what to do.”

Isola is still hopeful that, once a full analysis has been completed, the teams will accept that the impact on performance is not big enough to block the change, although one team noted a lap time difference of as much as 0.8s in Spa.

“The main purpose of this tyre is to have higher resistance to impact with external objects, I cannot explain why they felt less grip, or they had different lap times.

"If it happened, we need to quantify this difference. If the difference is very small, I don’t see a reason why we shouldn’t introduce it. If the difference is big, it means that there is an effect that we are not considering, and we need to better understand why we have this difference in grip before introducing the tyre.

“If there is a difference between performance or driveability, we have to consider this effect, and the impact of this effect on different teams.”

Isola agreed that Pirelli could still play the “safety card” with the support of the FIA and force through the change without the unanimous agreement of the teams.

“This is a decision we have to take with Pirelli. First of all, we have to decide with my managers, the top management of the company, which is the direction we want to follow.

"We will consider all the different effects, as I said, and after that we will discuss with the FIA if it is worth introducing or not.”

If the change does happen for Malaysia, Pirelli will face a major logistical challenge as it will have to build new tyres and airfreight them at the last minute. The standard tyres that it had originally planned to use have already gone by sea freight.

“If we want to introduce it in Malaysia, it means next week, we have all the data available, and we take the decision. We start the production for Malaysia, and we airfreight the tyres.

“I think probably, if we don’t introduce it in Malaysia, I’m not sure we will introduce it for this year. We will continue to test the concept that is in this prototype for next year, because it is interesting.

"If it is successful, we want to take it for next year’s tyres for sure.”