Pirelli motorsport chief Paul Hembery is still expecting the usual psychological mind games that some teams conduct in pre-season testing.
With major changes coming this season in car design and tyre size, you might think sandbagging and/ or glory runs would be less important with efforts concentrated on ensuring the new cars match data produced in the wind tunnel and the simulator.
However: “We really won’t know in Barcelona testing where the teams are as that’s a period where they won’t want to show their hand,” Hembery said at the Autosport International event in Birmingham.
“There will be a lot of people trying to hide their true performance level or maybe wondering what they need to do because they can’t even get close to some of the teams who are maybe sandbagging.”
You would expect, however, that when the racing begins in Australia we would get a truer sense of how each team has coped, but, Hembery actually thinks it will be China or Bahrain before a true pecking order is seen due to the unique characteristics of Albert Park and because it “throws up some strange results”.
Indeed, in recent times there was Kimi Raikkonen’s surprise win for Lotus in 2013, crazy races in 2010 and 2008 and some reliability woes for front-running teams including Mercedes and Red Bull in 2014.
What we can expect, however, is a lot more running than was conducted three years ago, when teams struggled to get to grips with the new engine formula.
With most reliability issues ironed out, though Renault and Honda are both promising aggressive new power units, we can expect teams to regularly surpass the 100-lap mark each day and gather as much data on the new cars and tyres as possible.
On tyres, Hembery once again spoke about how Pirelli may have gone too conservative with its new wider rubber due to the lack of performance from the three test cars Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes provided and how it could lead to fewer pit stops, but his main area of concern is with the new wet-weather tyres.
“We’re working on an on-going development during the season, which is something we’re allowed to do this season as before we weren’t allowed to test,” he explained.
“In the last three years, I think we had three days of testing. Now we have up to 25 car days in a season, so we have a programme to change the wet tyres during the season.”
Pirelli’s ‘Cincurato’ product has been criticised after three safety car starts were needed in 2016 as well as concerns raised after the Brazilian Grand Prix, which was held in very wet conditions.
Hembery said the Italian supplier was working on the warm-up of the rubber as drivers are finding it hard to get enough heat into the tyres but he said that development was dependent on help from the teams.
“We’re going to have standing starts, so the tyres are going to be cold.
“Like we do in GP2, where you don’t have blankets, we have to try and get a product which warms up a lot quicker,” he said.
“We’re trying to get one of the hybrid cars which we used in the last months of last year and trying to convince one of the teams to get it out of the museum and allow us to do a bit more work.”
