Low temperatures, new Barcelona tarmac cause F1 tyre headache

Low track temperatures and the new track surface at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya left drivers struggling to manage their tyres through Tuesday's Formula 1 pre-season test running.

After losing a chunk of last week's scheduled testing in Barcelona due to poor weather conditions, teams met blue skies for the start of the second test, albeit with the ambient temperature still hanging around 10ºC.

The cold temperature made it hard for drivers to warm up their tyres, but many still experienced significant blistering and wear across the softer compounds in Pirelli's range, including Haas driver Kevin Magnussen.

"It's still sightly tricky with the weather not quite being hot enough for those tyres to completely work as they should. It's a lot better than last week, but still not quite there to learn and feel confident with what we've learned," Magnussen said.

"The soft rear tyres blistered. In this cold weather, it's not what you expect. So that's pretty surprising. A lot of graining on the front left as well for us.

"I don't know about other teams, but we are struggling a little bit to manage the tyres. They don't heat up very quickly, you can't get the lap time on the first lap, yet they blister and grain like hell."

Asked if the issues were down to the temperature or the new tarmac, Magnussen said: "I think it's both. This tarmac needs a lot of temperature.

"The restart stuff we did at the end was impossible. It wouldn't have been possible to do that in a race. I couldn't get my tyres to work at all. I nearly couldn't even get going from zero, I was just wheel-spinning. I wouldn't have been able to get heat into my tyres.

"Hopefully it will be warmer in the race here."

Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton added: "The biggest challenge we faced today was to get the tyres working properly on this new track surface.

"The medium tyre was difficult to get working; the soft tyre is better for warm-up, but suffered with degradation. But we are learning all the time."