Last weekend’s Sao Paulo GP at Interlagos featured some of the most intense weather as there was persistent rain during both Saturday’s qualifying session and the Grand Prix on Sunday. With the FIA postponing qualifying to Sunday morning due to inclement weather, Lewis Hamilton joked with F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali that it was “ridiculous” that the motorsports governing body did not allow them to go out.
Hamilton believes that if F1 had better wet tires, they could have driven during Saturday’s qualifying session. Although the 39-year-old was only joking while providing this suggestion, Pirelli’s motorsports chief Mario Isola seems to agree with the British driver and has promised “better wet tires” for 2025.
“It is true that we need to improve the performance of the wet tire to generate a proper crossover with the intermediate,” Isola said as per Autosport.
“That’s our target. Next year we will have a new wet tire with some small modifications because unfortunately, we didn’t have the possibility to have a proper test with the wet tire on a high-severity circuit”.
“If you gave us better wet tyres or blankets, we’d be able to run in this.”
Lewis Hamilton
— Ferrari News (@FanaticsFerrari) November 3, 2024
Although F1 have full wet tires, rarely does any team use them until and unless required because of how slow they are in comparison to an intermediate. Moreover, the full wets tend to lose massive performance as soon as the circuit begins to dry up.
Isola too agrees with this, as he added that they will look to change “the tread pattern” and work on a “new compound” to improve the wet tires’ performance for 2025. However, he did make it clear that teams could still run on the wet tire as the “fastest of the slow cars” would then set the best lap time.
Teams were hesitant to opt for the full wets in Sao Paulo
Despite incessant rain hitting Interlagos and the visibility being extremely poor, most of the teams were hesitant to opt for the full wets because of how much speed they would lose to any rival who would have taken the bold decision to get on the intermediates. However, interestingly most of them did complain about the weather conditions and urged the FIA to red-flag the race.
The drivers who complained included eventual winner Max Verstappen, who had not even changed his initial intermediates when the conditions worsened. Eventually, the FIA had no choice but to red-flag the race when Franco Colapinto crashed into the barriers and his car was stranded in the middle of the track.
However, according to drivers like Oliver Bearman, the FIA should have red-flagged the race much sooner as it was evident that the conditions were extremely dangerous to race. While speaking to his race engineer on the team radio, the young Briton said,
“How are we allowed to race like this? Someone is going to crash big time. Guys I can’t even see in front. Yeah but, come on. Talk to the FIA. I’m just trying not to die”.
