Пирели за петък


Марио Изола:
The very low temperatures seen so far this week have come as quite a shock to many people, and of course they have an effect on tyre performance. It's in some ways a pity as we had hoped to give the drivers their first taste of the 2020 tyres in more representative weather, but obviously there's not much that we can do about it. On the positive side, there were only a few cases of light graining seen even in these extreme conditions – on the 2020 tyres and the current tyres – and the teams were still able to take away some useful information, on both new and used 2020 tyres, sometimes by doing back to back comparisons with the existing product. The relevance of this data is obviously compromised by the fact that it's a 2020 tyre on a 2019 car, which hasn't been optimised for this specification of tyre, but at least it allows the teams to gather some information in view of the final test of the year at Abu Dhabi. Apart from that, today consisted in carrying out the usual preparation work for qualifying and the race with different fuel loads, and in particular adapting the cars to these cold conditions. We experienced a very high degree of track evolution throughout the day that clearly influenced the lap times, but overall I'm actually quite surprised by how well the cars and tyres performed today in conditions that they really weren't designed for.