Pirelli continues the development of tires with a view to 2025. After the Monaco GP which ended with the victory of Charles Leclerc last Sunday, both Ferrari and the Milanese tire manufacturer will move to France for a private test session with the aim of work on both dry and wet tires with a view to the future.
In fact, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the two Italian manufacturers will lap at Paul Ricard, a track known for being a perfect location for testing not only for its numerous configurations, but also for the accompanying equipment. The first day will be dedicated to tests in the dry, with the C3, C4 and C5 compounds as protagonists, while the second day will instead be scheduled to carry out tests with the wet tyres, on which Pirelli has worked a lot over the last few months. on multiple fronts, also to meet the needs of Formula 1 and the teams.
It is not the first time this season that the Milanese manufacturer has dedicated itself to in-depth tests to develop its products for next year. Pirelli had started the journey with test sessions in Barcelona and Jerez even before the start of the championship, while after the Grand Prix in Suzuka it stopped in Japan with Racing Bulls and Sauber for another two days of testing. In that case, numerous prototypes were tested to give Pirelli confirmation on the structure of the 2025 tires: even if the first day was disturbed by rain, in that case the main objective of the test was to evaluate different prototypes of slick tires.
The test at Suzuka with wet tires in the morning of the first day
Photo by: Pirelli
Focus on full wets to improve performance
On the contrary, at Paul Ricard Pirelli is looking for answers above all on wet tyres, both intermediate and full wet. The choice of the French track is not random, given that it can be artificially wetted according to the manufacturer’s requests, increasing or decreasing the quantity of water to evaluate more characteristics of the tyres. This is not an easy test to organize, because Pirelli has to rent a track that can be artificially wetted in a fairly short time: Fiorano represents an alternative, but given the few high-speed corners that transmit a lot of energy, it is not always possible obtain very useful data for development that highlights some critical issues of the prototypes.
“We have two days of testing. The first is a dry session, while on the second day we will wet the track, but the priority is to run on wet tires to improve performance”, explained Simone Berra, Pirelli engineer, interviewed by Motorsport.com on the test objectives.
It is no mystery that on several occasions the drivers have complained about the fact that the full wet compound does not have excellent performance, unlike the intermediate one, so much so that as soon as possible they tend to return to the pits to make the pit stop, given that there it is a rather marked competitive gap between the two compounds. Full wet, in particular, suffers from overheating and tends to degrade more quickly. Even though heavy wet tires have often been little used in recent years, this does not mean that Pirelli does not want to improve their product.
Last year in Monaco a full wet made its debut which does not require the use of tyrewarmers: “We know that at the moment the full wet suffers a little too much from overheating and in terms of performance it degrades quite quickly due to the removal of the modifications which we did last year. We are therefore working on the compound, but above all on the tread design to reduce the movement of the tires and improve overheating because, if the movement of the rubber is reduced, less heat is generated and, consequently, less overheating”. The idea would also be to bring the performance of the full wet closer to the intermediate ones, but clearly Pirelli has to cover a wide range of scenarios, in particular one in which there is a lot of stagnant water on the track, for which there are some structural and safety limits to which it must respond in the design phase.
Ferrari’s Pirelli tyres
Photo by: Erik Junius
The intermediate is tested without a tyrewarmer
The goal is not only to improve the full wet, but also the intermediate ones. Already last year Pirelli had developed a prototype that did not require the use of tyrewarmers, but the teams preferred to postpone its introduction while waiting to see the behavior of the full wet tires with this innovation. After a year, Pirelli wants to continue the development program of the intermediate, even if at the moment, in terms of priority, it is not as fundamental as that of the full wet.
“We also have a plan for the intermediates, using fundamentally new compounds. Our goal is to eliminate the tyrewarmers on the intermediate, as we did with the extreme wet tyres.”
The basic idea is to introduce these changes for 2025, given the technical times of production and approval by the teams, but he did not rule out that some innovations could arrive already during this season if the test at Paul Ricard it will be a success, as happened last year with the full wets which do not require tyrewarmers.
We will also work to remove the tyrewarmers from the intermediates
Photo by: Erik Junius
The construction of the 2025 slick is defined
The work will not only be concentrated on the wet tyres, but also on the dry ones. During the first day with Ferrari, where official drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz will drive, Pirelli will try to define the structure of the slick tires for 2025 and evaluate the prototypes of the softer compound range for next year.
“For the slick test on the first day we will mainly focus on defining the construction for next season. But above all we will also try to test the C3, C4 and C5. For the C5 I think it is the first time we have tested it this season. So, it will be interesting to see some results on the compounds for next season,” said Berra.
In previous tests, Pirelli had already managed to get an idea of the progress made in terms of tire construction. Now it’s a matter of starting to finalize the prototypes.
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