Friday, 25 July 2014

Pirelli Hungarian GP Friday Review

(Pirelli Motorsport Media)

The opening track action of the Hungarian Grand Prix got underway this morning at the Hungaroring where all of the driver's used Pirelli's P Zero White walled medium compound rubber where Lewis Hamilton set the pace for Mercedes setting a time of 1m 25.814s. Despite the extremely high track temperatures experienced very low amounts of degradation throughout both sessions. 

In the second session most teams opted to conduct their long runs on the Pirelli P-Zero Yellow marked Soft compound tyre where drivers were able to use a brand new set for up to 14 laps. 

There is approximately a 1.6s difference in lap time between the two compounds and with that in mind it is believed  that with the warm temperatures that are expected over the course of the weekend  that teams will opt to run the Soft tyre in qualifying and therefore start the race on the Soft compound. 

Speaking about today's running Pirelli Motorsport Director Paul Hmebery said:

'We’re satisfied that the medium and soft tyres are working as we expected them to in Hungary, which is a circuit that can actually work the tyres quite hard despite the fact that it is low speed, especially if the set-up is not quite right. We’re seeing about 1.6 seconds between the two compounds at the moment, and this is likely not to change much, especially as the soft tyre in particular was showing low levels of thermal degradation. We think that this should be a two-stop race but we will have to analyse all the data fully before having a more concrete idea as to what the theoretical fastest strategy will be.'

© Ben Johnston 2014

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