Photo Credit: Pirelli
Pirelli are this evening working with Red Bull to understand what caused the first lap puncture that ultimately ended Sebastian Vettel‘s race in Abu Dhabi.
Paul Hembery, the Pirelli motorsport director, said that the incident seemed ‘very unusual’ and that there was no immediately obvious explanation for the tyre failure.
“Together with Red Bull Racing, we're still examining the remains of Sebastian Vettel's tyre in order to try and piece together what happened,” said Hembery. “It certainly seems to be a very unusual incident and we've already been to look at the place with Sebastian: there seems to be no reason that is immediately obvious and the set of tyres was one that he had already used for qualifying. But until we know for sure, there's no point in speculating.
“With the dropping temperatures, our soft and medium tyres were faced with slightly different track conditions to normal, with different teams trying a very wide variety of strategies, from one to three stops,” he added. “I've been told that last year there were just 11 overtaking manoeuvres here, so this year certainly presented quite a contrast.
“Normally at this point we would be packing up to go home, but now we look forward to the young driver test later this week, where we will try out some of our 2012 range of tyres for the first time.”
