Esteban Ocon has warned that the planned banning of tyre blankets could pose warm-up problems and cause unnecessary safety concerns if they are introduced as scheduled for the 2024 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season.
Pirelli were set to drop the tyre blanket temperature from seventy degrees Celsius down to fifty degrees for the 2023 Formula 1 season in anticipation of removing tyre blankets all together the following season, and they tested this scenario in free practice for the United States Grand Prix.
However, Ocon reckons that safety could be compromised should the tyre blankets be outlawed in 2024, and it would have a negative effect on strategy, with the BWT Alpine F1 Team driver reckoning that any idea of using the undercut to pass someone would disappear.
“It’s not working at the moment,” Ocon is quoted as saying by PlanetF1.com. “We’ve tested in Austin, which was quite a warm weekend. It’s a high energy track and we were improving every lap, but we were very far off the pace on the out-lap, it was like being on ice, for example, in the first couple of corners.
“So it is not Formula 1 philosophy let’s say, you can forget the undercuts, you can forget any strategy goal, because you will take three or four laps to warm up the tyres, so it is quite boring.
“And especially for safety on a weekend like Spa, where it’s 12 degrees or 10 degrees, it’s just going to be not safe to start with.”
If the plan to remove them continues to be pushed, however, Ocon believes Pirelli will find a way to make it work, although he says he is pleased that the planned reduction in tyre blanket temperature in 2023 has been cancelled.
And the Frenchman knows the FIA will step in if there are any concerns over safety, particularly when they know the current system is working in a way that makes for more exciting racing.
“I’m sure Pirelli will find a way to get this thing to work if we keep the non-blankets rule in, but at the moment we didn’t test something that was working,” Ocon said. “And next year, we revert back now to 70 degrees for two hours. So that’s working, so that’s that’s fine, that’s going to be similar to this year.
“And yeah, if we keep testing things that are so slippery like this at the start of the lap, then I’m sure the FIA will revert to how it is this year if we can’t do it.”
