Pirelli has confirmed that it will bring its soft and hard compounds to Silverstone.
There had been some question of a medium/hard combination being used, but Pirelli has decided to take a punt on the soft, while knowing that it is going to be a bit marginal around Silverstone, where the teams will also take a step into the unknown as they run under the new engine mapping rules.
The presence of the soft is good news for Ferrari, for whom medium/hard would be a nightmare combination. Equally the use of hards – as opposed to medium/softs – will favour Red Bull over the prime stint.
“It’s one of the hardest circuits we face during the year,” said Pirelli’s Paul Hembery. “Together with Istanbul, Malaysia and going forward somewhere like Spa and Monza for the high speed, and then Suzuka. So it’s one of the big challenges.
“And also being England it’s very variable in terms of weather. This week they were having 30C, today I believe it’s down to about 15C. So again from a tyre maker’s point of view making a compound work in that wide variety of conditions is a big challenge. Hence the reason that also offering the soft compound would allow us to operate well in cooler conditions.
“There have been some comments that maybe working with the hard compound favours teams that have a lot of downforce, that may or may not be true. What I can say is that as a tyre company we also have to look after our interests, and that means in a severe condition such as Silverstone the hard compound gives us a back-up so that we don’t end up in difficulties with the product.”
Germany will see a medium/soft pairing, while Hungary will see the soft/supersoft combination back.
Adam Cooper F1 
Wow, I wonder what the lap time difference will be between the softs and the hards at Silverstone. That must be at least a second and a half.
Its odd that most places are reporting that Ferrari’s main worry was the possible selection of the Hard tyre rather than whether the soft/medium would go alongside it.
Massa said on Sunday night ‘We don’t want the hard and medium’. Guess most places on the internet don’t have journalists actually at the races talking to people.
This is true. The site does quote him as saying he didn’t want hard and medium, he wanted soft and medium. The article then goes on to suggest that the Ferrari doesn’t like the hard tyres as it suffered with them at Barcelona. Hence me thinking that the Hards were bad new rather than good news for Ferrari.
PS it was one of your colleagues at Autosport that wrote the article 😉
I don’t really get the whole tyre problem…if they don’t know what the weather will be like, why announce it a week and a half in advance? I guess the teams have all kinds of data to generate and then analyse, but still.