Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen remain central to tyre debate at French GP
The stage is set for another head-to-head battle for victory between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton after the pair qualified alongside each other on the front row for Sunday’s French Grand Prix.
Verstappen will start from a pole position convincingly won in his Red Bull at Paul Ricard, having beaten Hamilton by a quarter of a second on Saturday. The Dutchman heads into the race four points ahead of the Mercedes driver and keen to make amends for the tyre failure that cost him victory in Azerbaijan two weeks ago.
That collapsing left-rear tyre – and an almost identical failure earlier in the Baku race on Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin – continues to cast a shadow over Formula 1, and this weekend it has even intruded into the battle between Hamilton and Verstappen.
Insiders say the pair had a disagreement on Friday as the drivers discussed tyre safety and related matters with Pirelli, governing body the FIA and F1 in a 90-minute meeting.
What was the meeting about?
The backdrop was the tighter tyre-operating protocols imposed on all teams this weekend, after Pirelli blamed the failures suffered by Verstappen and Stroll on the “running conditions” of the tyres. And beyond that the drivers’ wider concerns about the repeated pattern of occasional tyre failures over the past several years.
Red Bull and Aston Martin had found a way to keep the pressures of their tyres lower in the race than the tyre company had expected, Pirelli F1 boss Mario Isola explained in a news conference on Thursday.
They were still above the minimum starting pressure limit Pirelli sets to guarantee the structural integrity of the tyre, he said, but below the level they had been calculated to reach when the car was out on track.
“We assume running at a certain pressure with margin will be OK for the tyre,” Isola said. “In that case, we did not achieve the conditions [required], not because the teams were doing something against the regulation but because they were looking for performance and that created a different scenario. And that was the tyres were running at a lower pressure than expected. And that created the failure.”
Agencies