The Pirelli tyres that will be rolled out for 2019 will have simplified names, as no matter what the actual compound is, the official name would still be hard, medium and soft.
The change was forced upon Pirelli by F1 so as to not confuse the fans with so many tyre compound names.
However, in an interview with Racefans, Pirelli’s sporting director, Mario Isola has revealed that for inquisitive fans, the information about the ‘real’ tyre compound will somehow be made available.
And for the one’s that do not want to really delve into the technical aspect of the tyre, the compounds will be named as ‘hard’, ‘medium’ and ‘soft’, no matter what the actual composition is.
“We will tell you which is the compound we nominate for each race because obviously we are not going to race with the [same] three compounds everywhere,” said Isola.
“We will find a way to give you the information but for spectators that are not really interested in technical stuff they will learn three colours, three names and that’s all.” he added.
Hence, the same tyre compounds will have different names for different races depending on what original compound Pirelli has deemed fit for that race.
“We will have different compounds associated to the same colour and when we have the tyres returning to the warehouse… we must be 100% sure we don’t mix [them]. We need to find a solution to avoid any minimal risk to mix the tyres.
“Also we need to understand how to manage collective testing. Now we are using all different colours, tomorrow what do we do? When they have all the compounds available, five or six, or whatever number it will be, which system do we use to recognise?” Isola said.
The colour scheme for next year too would be finalised only after talking to the TV broadcasters, as the colours should be easily visible and differentiable on screen.
“I will have another meeting with FOM and with the people from television to understand which are the three colours that are more visible. Somebody told me on television it’s difficult to recognise white from yellow.” Isola concluded.
