Red Bull has requested an investigation from the FIA as it accuses McLaren F1 of cooling its tires by putting water in them. Mario Isola, director of Pirelli’s Formula 1 program, was asked about this and was skeptical that it would be useful and feasible, given the steam that would be generated.
“The way to do it is very simple in practical terms” Isola said. “You have a valve, you put water inside. How the system works is another story. It’s basically a thermal effect, heat transfer between the tire and the rim, which should give more consistency or less degradation to the tires, even if pressure control is less good.”
“Because if you have steam inside the tires, you lose control of the pressure, you have higher pressure. I heard the story, I tried to understand myself how it works and I collected this information. Whether anyone did it or not is still a question mark.”
Pirelli promises to give all the information necessary for the investigation, but Isola explains that he has seen no trace of such a practice in the data of the tires recovered from McLaren, and used during the races. In fact, the Italian firm’s engineers constantly monitor the tires during the race.
“I don’t see anything strange in the data we have, so I don’t have any proof. It’s now up to the FIA to decide what to do and tell us if we can support it because At the end of the day, the only thing we can do is support this.”
Rain tires criticized again
With qualifying postponed yesterday due to water on the track, the debate over wet tires has obviously come to the fore. Isola admits that full wet tires are not good enough and he hopes to improve quickly.
“It is true that we must improve the performance of the rain tire to generate an adequate crossover with the intermediate tire. This is our objective” Isola continued.
“Next year we will have a new rain tire with some small modifications, because unfortunately we did not have the opportunity to do a real test with the rain tire on a high-intensity circuit.”
“That’s exactly what we’re missing. We changed the tread pattern a bit, worked on the construction and a new compound. We found an improvement. I can’t tell you if it’s enough or not.”
The Italian doesn’t know if lack of confidence was the reason for race director Niels Wittich’s postponement of qualifying: “I don’t know why Niels decided not to give the session the green light, I don’t know if it’s because of the visibility, the standing water, the risk of aquaplaning, or anything else element.”
“I haven’t spoken to Niels, so I don’t have any information on that. If it’s just the performance on the wet tyre, that means they’re going slower, that’s everything. So it’s the fastest of the slow cars that achieves the best time.”
“We are very aware that we need to improve the performance of the wet tires. But you can race with these wet tires, it’s not that you can’t race.”
