Friday 17 April 2015

Pirelli Bahrain Grand Prix Friday Practice Report

(Pirelli Motorsport Media)

Pirelli have made the Medium and Soft compound tyre’s available for this weekend’s Bahrain Night race at the Sakhir circuit. 

The track action got underway today with Scuderia Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel setting the early pace this morning with Raikkonen completing his fastest time this morning of 1m 37.827s using a new set of the P-Zero white walled Medium compound tyre.

In Free Practice Two the Mercedes AMG PETRONAS F1 Team’s Nico Rosberg set the fastest time of 1m 34.647s on a set of brand new P-Zero yellow walled Soft tyres.

Over the course of the days on track action Pirelli rubber covered a total of 5,042km between the P-Zero white walled Medium compound and P-Zero yellow walled Soft tyre. A total of 59 sets of the Medium and 20 Soft tyres were used during Friday.

The highest number of consecutive laps on the Medium tyre was 25 laps while 22 consecutive laps were completed on the Soft tyre. Speaking following today’s action Pirelli Motorsport Director Paul Hembery stated:

The pattern of wear and degradation today was exactly as we expected, especially in FP2, which was the only really relevant session. From a tyre perspective, there was less to be learned from FP1, which was nearly 20 degrees warmer. While the pattern of data collection is a little bit different to other races because of these temperatures differences, we’re seeing that the soft tyre will be key to the race – which is around two seconds quicker than the medium. However, there is talk of a sandstorm tomorrow and that’s not generally good news for tyres or anyone! So we’ll see what qualifying brings…

© Ben Johnston 2015

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