Hembery concerned by Di Resta Pirelli failure

Pirelli boss Paul Hembery says it’s too early to draw too many conclusions after a spectacular tyre failure for Paul Di Resta in FP2 in Barcelona.

Di Resta’s left rear lost its tread as he went through the corner onto the pit straight. Warned by a vibration, the Force India driver was able to back off, bringing the car to a safe halt at the end of the pit lane.

There have been similar issue already this season with the medium compound, and Hembery made it clear that the sight of a tyre without its tread represented bad PR for Pirelli.

“It doesn’t look pretty obviously when you get the tread coming away like that,” he said. “And if anything last year if we had failures it tended to collapse the tyre onto the rim, so it still didn’t look good. This year we’re seeing the tread coming away. So visually it looks rubbish, and we obviously don’t like that, and we’re looking at that and seeing if there are things we can do to eliminate it.”

Asked about the cause he said: “It’s always very difficult because you get a bag of bits back. It’s certainly causing by overheating the tread.

“The structure didn’t give way, it’s the tread – that’s what we’ve seen a few other cases, the tread is overheating and coming away. From some points of view it would be better if the structure gave way and then it collapsed and it wouldn’t look quite so spectacular. In any case it’s not something that we like and we’re looking at what we can do.”