A planned return to “very high degradation tyres” in the 2020 F1 season is now unlikely to happen, according to Pirelli.

A tender issued last year to potential tyre suppliers for F1 between 2020 and 2023 set high targets for degradation. It specified a soft tyre which lost around two seconds of lap time over 10% of a race distance.

However according to Pirelli, which won the tender and will continue as F1’s tyre supplier for the next four seasons, F1 has since turned against the plan.

“We have an ongoing discussion with both FIA and FOM and also the teams to understand which is the direction,” said Pirelli motorsport director Mario Isola in responds to a question from RaceFans.

“If you look at the tender document released by the FIA – the target letter that was appended to the document – they were thinking [about] very high degradation tyres. But looking at what happened last year now we quite agree that it is probably not the right direction.”

Pirelli’s attempt to create more varied, multi-stop race strategies last year using higher degradation tyres was not successful.

“We tried to be a lot aggressive with the three compounds and basically the teams were increasing the pace management to go on a one-stop,” said Isola.

Rival tyre manufacturer Michelin told RaceFans last year it did not submit an application to the F1 tender partly because “Formula 1 didn’t accept our recommendation to stop going towards the degradation with [the] tyres”.

However Isola pointed out that other approaches to tyre selection may not produce more lively races.

“If we go conservative with all the three compounds then the hardest of the three is not chosen by anybody and you just have the mandatory set. If we use the two soft that are quite close and a hard that is one step harder, nobody is using this one. If we use two conservative and one that is more aggressive – the softest is one step more aggressive, then we create an issue to the midfield because the top teams try to qualify on the medium while the others are obliged to use the soft and their race is done.

“So it’s difficult. We don’t have the perfect solution.

“What we are trying to do is to run many simulations with different delta lap times with different levels of degradation to understand which is the best. That is not perfect, but at least is in the right direction.”

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2021 F1 season