Having been on the receiving end of some criticism after China Pirelli F1 boss Paul Hembery said he was satisfied with the performance of the company’s hard and medium tyres in Bahrain today.
Pirelli had intended to bring the hard and soft, but changed its mind immediately after Malaysia – well before last weekend’s race in Shanghai.
Hembery believes that teams could aim for two stops, something that Jenson Button achieved in China.
“It was pretty good,” said Hembery of Friday. “To be honest we expected the track to be a bit dirtier, when you come to circuits like this, particularly here when you can often get sand blown onto the circuit quite a lot, we expected a little bit more dust and graining on the rear tyres, which we didn’t actually see.
“So that was good, it meant we probably had a better P1 than you’d normally have on such a track. A few people were running 22-23 laps, which is pretty much in line with what we want to see, with this sort of circuit.
“There’s a big variation between the teams in terms of the peak performance between the compounds, between 0.5s-0.8s is where we think it is. There were a few that were much bigger, but we think that’s an anomaly. We see from the wear levels that a two-stop is probably feasible, we came into the race thinking that three would be most likely, but looking at today’s data two, if there’s a little bit more track evolution, could be possible.
“Degradation levels are about 0.115 on the harder tyre, and probably up to double that on the medium. Here the harder tyre seems to be working better than it did in Malaysia, where the medium tyre was used more as the race tyre.”
Adam Cooper F1 