TJ13 analysis following the Australian GP revealed that Pirelli were most likely to fail to hit their brief to deliver tyres that would see two to three pit stops on average per race. TJ13 contacted Pirelli and they claimed Australia was a ‘one off’ and that other circuits would be different. Now Pirelli admits the 2015 tyre compounds will fall short of the target number of pit stops.

Following the Australian GP, Christian Horner observed, “One-stop races aren’t good for Formula 1. You need to have two to three stops, and that’s important. Unfortunately, the tyres we have now are just a bit too conservative”.

Pirelli expected the teams to deliver greater advances in lap time this year, around 2 seconds but the actual increase based on the average increase in race fastest laps from 2014 is just over 0.5 seconds.

“The [tyre] changes over the winter, going into this year, means they’ve gone a bit more conservative again,” added Horner. “Whereas the tyres we had last year were about the right balance for strategy and degradation.”

Force India recently proposed that each F1 team be given the freedom to select the two dry tyre compounds they would run at each race weekend in advance. This would replace the current system where Pirelli select two compounds and all the teams can use just those two.

Pirelli are opposed to this idea, though the unanimous agreement at the strategy group on the Force India proposal means it is currently set to be enforced in 2016.

The Italian tyre manufacturer have responded with a new proposal of their own.

“If we were able to choose from a wider range [than the current four dry tyres] then we’d have more certainty to deliver the two-to-three-stop races,” says Paul Hembery

“As far as the public is concerned it would be [for example still] a hard and a medium tyre… at a certain type of race.

“But we would be able to choose from three versions of the hard and three versions of the medium”.

This would mean the range of dry tyres developed by Pirelli for each year would rise from 4 to 12. Three versions each of the super soft, soft, medium and hard tyres. However, the public would apparently be left in the dark as to which of the three sub-range of tyres was being used at each race.

“For the public, I don’t think we need to do anything different as it would just create confusion. It would be too complex”.

Of course this kind of secrecy would mean the TJ13 analysis performed following the Australian GP would be much more difficult and maybe impossible, because nobody would know which of the three soft or three medium tyres Pirelli had chosen.