The weekend at Silverstone was a nightmare for the prancing horses and their herd of fans.
Kimi Raikkonen was behind the race leader Lewis Hamilton and championship leader Sebastian Vettel was in fourth place when both the Ferraris had punctures on consecutive laps towards the end of the race, on the penultimate lap.
This shortened the championship title gap by one point, which is a major concern for the team, when both the Ferraris fell back to third and seventh place.
Although they did get a podium finish for the Finn, Ferrari boss Maurizio Arrivabene was not happy with Pirelli.
Pirelli’s Mario Isola understood the grief of Ferrari, and immediately took to investigate the issue. Although both the drivers had incurred very similar failures, Mario claims that both the punctures were caused by very different.
In a statement to Motorsport, Mario had said “We believe it has to be proven, that model failure of the two tyres is different. So, we need to investigate.”.
“What we can exclude that we had any carcass failure on Kimi’s tyres because the tyre was still inflated. There is a part of the tyre that is damaged and we will investigate deeply on all the tyre and not only this tyre.”, said Mario on the incident.
Sebastian Vettel had made his stance clear of the tyre issue. “Hindsight is great, with hindsight it is easy, but at the time it felt okay. Kimi, I think had a similar issues, and his tyres were at least five or six laps fresher.
So, I think it caught us both by surprise.”.” I think it could have been a little bit better for sure, but disaster I don’t think so. I think we had a good car, especially in the corners. The balance was alright.”, according to Motorsport.
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On 21st July Pirelli had again released a statement saying Sebastian’s problem was to be blamed on slow puncture. While Sebastian’s issue had been dealt with, Mario of Pirelli said that the cause of the tyre failure of Kimi was still under investigation.
It was not only the Ferraris who had issues with tyre at Silverstone, but even the championship contender of the silver arrows, Lewis Hamilton, who had suffered a similar fate, but not to the extent of the Ferraris. Mercedes’ Toto Wolff had said that Lewis had kept them informed of the tyre’s condition constantly.
In a statement to Sky Sports, Toto said,” We had a tiny little blister developing and he warned us, but then we didn’t know whether it was maybe [caused by] some debris on track,”.
