Mario Isola is expecting this weekend’s French Grand Prix to be held in much warmer conditions to what transpired in 2021, with the event taking place a month later than it did last year.
Rain hit the Circuit Paul Ricard on the Sunday morning of the 2021 event and made for cool conditions during the race, but the weather is set to be more predictable and much hotter this weekend, which will put more strain on Pirelli’s tyres.
Isola, the Motorsport Director, is interested to see how the eighteen-inch tyres fare this weekend when overheating affected their thirteen-inch predecessors, around a track where strategy is expected to be the key to winning or losing.
“This year’s French Grand Prix takes place nearly a month later than it did last year, when it rained on Sunday morning, so it’s fair to expect warmer temperatures,” said Isola.
“This year’s generation of tyres and compounds is different and more resistant to overheating than the thirteen-inch versions used last year, so we’ll have to see how that affects the strategy.
“A bit of history: Paul Ricard was actually where our eighteen-inch tyres for the current era made their debut, at a test with Renault and Sergey Sirotkin back in 2019.”
Going off track at Paul Ricard can also have a damaging and lingering effect on the tyres thanks to the high-friction red, white and blue materials that surround the track, with flat-spotting a definite possibility.
Pirelli are bringing their middle of the range tyres to the south of France, with the white-banded C2 being the hard compound, yellow-banded C3 being the medium, and the red-banded C4 being the softest available compound.
