Christian Horner says that none of the teams have a proper handle on how to get the best out of Pirelli’s 2013 tyres.
However he says that it’s too early to suggest that the racing is too artificial.
“At the moment we’ve got one race as a reference,” he said. “Let’s see how this weekend pans out, and then we’ll start to get a clearer picture. But for sure you can see the tyres are quite fragile.
“You’ve only got to look at the slow motion shots here to see the amount of rubber that’s coming off them, even in a straight line, which is quite surprising. But then it’s the same tyre for everybody.
“I think the tyres for sure are a key, key role at the moment, and I think they’ll be a decisive factor here this weekend. It’s going to be a matter of finding that operating window that gives them performance and longevity.
“I think what we want to avoid is drivers driving around under the performance of their car, unable to follow another car closely. I think that’s what we desperately need to avoid – otherwise it’s not racing. It’s still early days, so let’s see a sample of two or three races, and we’ll be able to gauge from there. It doesn’t look like the situation is really too much different from the winter testing.”
In Australia Sebastian Vettel suffered greater degradation than team mate Mark Webber, which is not the usual pattern.
“Mark seemed to have better longevity with his tyre,” he said when asked about the race by this writer. “I think looking at Seb’s race, following Sutil did quite a bit of damage to the tyre. We were just not in the right operating window with Sebastian, who’s usually so good at managing the tyres. He was just powerless to be able to extend that stint length, and usually he’s the best in the business at that.”
As to whether it was frustrating to have a potentially fast car but not be able to use its performance, Horner said: “Obviously a quick car puts a little bit more energy into a tyre, you can see that in Melbourne, you can see that a little bit more here. For sure we’ve got a very good car, we’ve just got to work out how best to use these tyres. We’ve just got to work hard to understand that and get on top of it.
“I don’t think anybody up and down this pit lane fully understands these tyres, to be quite honest. I think if you can explain the different performances in different parts of the race, whether it be a Force India which was incredibly soft on a hard tyre and then killed a soft tyre, or the opposite way round for Mercedes, or Toro Rosso setting purple sectors, or Kimi Raikkonen setting fastest lap two laps from the end on a tyre that had done 20 laps… There were so many anomalies. A key aspect of this season is going to be getting on top of those tyre issues, and understanding them.”
Adam Cooper F1 