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COMPROMISE NEEDED
Pirelli is not the only protagonist having to adjust constantly. So are the chassis departments in every team. Working on models supplied by the Milan-based company, designers have had to leave some leeway and keep their options open amid ongoing tinkering. It is only after they can assess tyre behaviour in real conditions that engineers will be able to make difficult but informed choices.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Force India technical director Andy Green told Racecar Engineering for their November 2016 issue. “We’re effectively designing the car blind and we have to give ourselves lots of freedom to be able to move in so many different directions depending on what Pirelli bring.
“Pirelli don’t know what the tyres are going to be yet, so we have got no idea. I think the real challenge at the moment is determining how much of a compromise we will make for the tyres and also for the future development of the car.
“We have to give ourselves a lot of room to manoeuvre going into the start of the season because we’ve really got no idea what the set-up of the car is going to be, no idea at all how the tyres are going to perform from a one-lap perspective or from a race perspective.
“We don’t know what they are sensitive to or not sensitive to, so it’s a matter of keeping everything open and that is incredibly difficult, because it means you are compromising.”
While change in the dynamics of the car’s airflow structures can be partly anticipated, provided that Pirelli’s smaller scale models deform like their real-size counterparts, suspension kinematics can only be optimised when the actual chassis is fitted with the full size tyres.
The latter will continue to be a key performance factor, as their management remains something of a black art. Last year, Ferrari struggled with overheating tyres at the rear on its SF16-H despite stable regulations for several years.
With so many unknowns ahead of the new campaign, Pirelli decided to mandate the tyre compound allocations for the first five grand prix weekends, this also to ensure technical equality between F1’s Big Three, which could test 2017-spec tyres last year, and their rivals.
