Formula 1 teams accept that their decision to use last year’s tyres instead of the new rubber developed for 2020 will bring some limitations, according to Pirelli.

The sport’s official tyre supplier says it will have to raise tyre pressures to ensure last year’s rubber works with the faster 2020 cars, and that tyre degradation is likely to be higher.

The teams opted not to use Pirelli’s new rubber for the 2020 F1 season after testing the tyres at the end of last year. Pirelli’s head of Formula 1 and car racing Mario Isola said they understood the compromises the decision would involve.

“The 2020 tyres have been designed to have less overheating or less degradation considering the increase in performance of the cars,” he explained.

“Teams are aware of the fact that choosing 2019 [tyres] for another year means that we are obliged to increase the pressure and therefore they will they will find more overheating in 2020 compared to 2019 and also more degradation. They know that, they accepted that. This is my expectation.”

Pirelli has some scope to limit the increase in tyre pressures and manage the degradation, said Isola.

“Obviously, we can also work around the compound selection. If we want, in some cases, to reduce the overheating, we can, for example, nominate a harder selection.

“But considering that if I look back at the last year, we had many races where the selection was the right one – that means that all the three compounds have been used and we had different strategies – I’m not anticipating that we are going to change a lot of races. So most of them will be with the same compound selection or very similar.”

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2020 F1 season