‘No reason not’ to introduce Pirelli proto F1 tyre after positive test

F1’s 10 teams were given the opportunity to run the new rear tyre construction across Friday’s two practice sessions at the Red Bull Ring, with the majority reporting they were satisfied with the performance of the C4 compound.

The teams will get a final chance to trial the construction that has been developed in response to the two high-speed failures that occurred at last month’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix in FP3 on Saturday morning.

But Pirelli’s chief Mario Isola sees no reason why the construction won’t be introduced at the next round of the championship at Silverstone in two weeks’ time.

“The test was positive,” he said. “I want to wait until tomorrow because some of the teams are planning to run them again tomorrow morning and then we take the final decision.

“I didn’t have any objection, I didn’t have any negative comments,” Isola added. “I didn’t collect anything that is making me think there is no good reason not to introduce the prototype in Silverstone.

“We are going to receive the data tonight, so we want to take a bit of time to analyse the data and to finalise also the collecting of the feedback. But to be honest I don’t see a reason why not to introduce it at Silverstone.”

AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly said his first impression of the new construction was positive, adding there was no “night and day difference” compared to the older version.

“To be honest we tried them in P1 and there wasn’t much difference on our side,” the Frenchman said.

“We need to look a bit more detail but the good thing is that there is not a night and day difference between the two, so that’s quite positive. We will spend a bit more time to make sure we get on top of it.”

Meanwhile, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner praised Pirelli’s fast reaction to the incidents that happened in Baku and denied Max Verstappen a certain win.

“Credit to Pirelli that they’ve reacted so quickly to Azerbaijan and bought prototypes here,” Horner said.

"The initial feedback from the drivers was pretty benign that it didn’t feel too different to what they previously had.

“Hopefully that’s a positive because we’d hate at this point of the year to have a variable introduced that favoured one team or another.

“From what we could see in the short amount of running that we did, there was nothing untoward.”