RBR boss Christian Horner says it’s up to Pirelli to act quickly to address the failure issue that struck several cars in the British GP.
Although Red Bull was not among the teams affected by a catastrophic failure the crew discovered that Sebastian Vettel was on the verge of a problem when they examined his tyres after his first pit stop, and found signs of delamination.
“Obviously with the failures that were happening it was quite a concern,” said Horner. “We had some issues, certainly on a set of Sebastian’s tyres at the first stop, that probably weren’t too far from a similar thing happening.
“I think the first thing you’re thinking about is the safety of your drivers, so the first thing is to try and understand what was causing it – was it a kerb, was it debris, was it something else?
“So we instructed both drivers to steer clear of the kerbs, to drive relatively conservatively, and obviously followed the advice of Pirelli with pressures and other bits and pieces. They seemed pretty random because obviously it happened on different compounds.
“Pirelli more than anybody will be very keen to try and understand and have to rectify it.”
Asked if the tyres were dangerous, he said: “Arguably today yes they are. But it’s something that Pirelli… It’s their product, it’s their technology, they need to understand it, and address it quickly.
“The most logical thing would be to go back to the tyres that have worked for them well previously. The tyres last year didn’t have these failures. Whatever’s changed has change, and you would have thought the most logical thing would be to go back to the tyres that have previously served them well.
“The problem with that is that teams are always perceived to be chasing competitive advantage, but I think from our perspective we were leading the race on these tyres today, we’ve won races on these tyres… I would urge to change purely on the ground of safety, because what happened today, obviously I’m sure Pirelli won’t be very happy about.”
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