Pirelli’s Chief Engineer Simone Berra has disagreed with a claim from Lewis Hamilton that the manufacturer’s current tyre allocation has a narrow operating window.
During the Miami Grand Prix, Hamilton expressed dissatisfaction with the compounds that Pirelli has supplied in 2024, claiming the operating range was “minuscule”.
The seven-time F1 champion labelled the tyres as his “least favourite” since the Italian brand became the single supplier, citing the range has a “peaky” performance.
“Honestly, it’s probably the most frustrating thing,” explained Hamilton. “You look back in the day when you had a much bigger working window to work with.
“Then you can just optimise the balance and then just have good grip throughout the whole lap. This is definitely my least favourite.”
Pirelli has countered those claims as Berra explained that the issue is not the tyres, but rather the field being closer to each other making management more crucial.
Berra claims the tyre characteristics haven’t changed, but since the differences between teams were bigger in the past, with several tenths of lap time spreading the teams, being on the perfect spot with the tyres wasn’t as critical as it is now when every detail can make a difference between ahead of behind a rival team or driver.
“Every tyre has a peak at some point and the operating window is always just a definition,” Berra told Autosport when asked about Hamilton’s comments.
“We take a certain percentage of grip loss to define the window.
“I think even in the past it was the same. But probably it was less critical because the level of detail that we have at the moment is quite significant.
“That’s why now everything is highlighted and important. In the past, 15-20 years ago, you had cars or drivers even divided by half a second or seven-tenths of a second so it was not so narrow.
“But the fight now is completely different, and even one-tenth of a second makes a great difference.”
Berra also explained that the peakiness of the tyres can vary a lot from car to car and even between compounds, using the C4 and C5 compounds as examples of potentially peaky compounds.
“We know very well that especially C4, and in some cases obviously with high temperature the C5, there can be a peaky performance,” Berra admitted.
“Some teams are less able compared to others to extract the peak of performance.
“Part of it is the tyre, yes honestly it is, but part of it is as well, the car, the suspension, and how the car is, exploiting the compound performance. So, it’s both factors.”
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