'Even super softs wouldn't have helped'

Monday 27th June 2011

'Even super softs wouldn't have helped'

'Even super softs wouldn't have helped'

Paul Hembery says that while using the super soft Pirellis may have helped a bit in Valencia, there wasn't a lot that could have been done to spice up Sunday's bore-fest.

Pirelli opted to take the soft and their new medium compound tyres to the European GP as the super softs would have worn too fast in the hot conditions.

And, unfortunately, their tyre options did not help alleviate the 57 laps of boredom where, as Hembrey points out, even DRS could do little to spice up the action.

"What we saw in GP2 and GP3 was that there was a lot of the overtaking under braking, and there are not that many places to overtake here," the Pirelli motorsport director told Autosport.

"But the F1 cars have extremely good braking, so we lost that little opportunity.

"From our point of view probably the conservative choice of medium did not help.

"If we had gone the super soft route - it would not have worked tremendously well here because it is far too hot for it - but people would have had to use it in qualifying and, if they had just got eight laps out of it, it would have pushed people harder on the soft, perhaps to the limit.

"They would only have needed a couple more laps out of each set on the soft, but some might have done it, some might have not and that might have brought into play a little bit more the performance difference of the cars as the tyres degraded more.

"We have seen that maybe we could have assisted - but I am not sure of that of course because we didn't see the DRS working in many places."

Hembrey, though, is adamant that Pirelli will learn lessons from Valencia as they continue with their first season back in F1.

"It is one for all of us to look back on - we need to look back and see what we could do.

"Having the super soft may well have created a slightly more interesting race, but I have doubts with the overtaking zones that it would not have changed a huge amount. It certainly would not have been as exciting as some of the other races we have seen."

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