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Pirelli have come out with a response to Lewis Hamilton’s complaints about this year’s tyres and their ‘minuscule’ working range.
The Miami Grand Prix saw drivers struggle to find the sweet spot with Hamilton complaining about his difficult to work with the tyres.
“I think we’re just working in a really, like, minuscule window of tyre temps,” he said.
“I think it’s this tyre. Definitely, in all my career, I don’t remember ever having such a small window of working.”
Lewis Hamilton is not happy with this year’s tyres
GETTY
However, Pirelli have come out and defended the tyres they chose for 2024 and suggested Hamilton’s struggles may have more to do with his Mercedes car.
Pirelli’s F1 chief engineer Simone Berra feels it also has a lot to do with how much data is available now compared to a few decades ago.
“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 said.
“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.
“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 added: “We know very well that especially C4, and in some cases obviously with high temperature the C5, there can be a peaky performance.
“Some teams are less able compared to others to extract the peak of performance.
Lewis Hamilton feels the tyres don’t have much of an operating window
GETTY
“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.”
Pirelli’s head of car racing and F1 Mario Isola also defended its tyres for 2024 and claimed work is being done to ensure they operate in a larger window.
“If we look at a graph, the grip of the tyre is on the vertical coordinates and the temperature is on the horizontal,” he said.
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“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 overeating.”
Isola added: “Once the peak of grip has been reached, at the highest point of the curve, the graph normally shows us a 3 per cent 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.”
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