Pirelli unveils new tyres for 2012 F1 season

The new range of F1 tyres from Pirelli for 2012 season

Italian tyre-maker Pirelli, the official tyre supplier of Formula One, unveiled the newly designed tyres which are to be used during the 2012 F1 season. Pirelli has made some minor tweaks in the Pirelli P Zero tyres which were used in 2011 to make the tyres far more efficient and easy to recognize its compound type. These tyres will be used throughout the 2012 season and 2 tyre compounds will be chosen per race depending on track conditions and other factors.

The color coding of different tyre compounds has been altered. Here is the new coding which will be deployed in 2012:

• Red – Super-soft
• Yellow – Soft
• Silver – Hard
• Green – Intermediate
• Blue – Wet

As you may have noticed, the color of the intermediate tyres will be Green in 2012 instead of Orange last year. The other colors remain unchanged from last season. The change in colors of the Intermediate tyre is said to have been done to enable viewers to recognize it easily. Moreover, the color bands and lettering on the tyres have been made larger for the same reason.

Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery said, “We have increased the bulk of the colours, and we have done a lot of work filming spinning tyres.”

Pirelli had a turbulent 2011 season. While many drivers felt that the Pirelli tyres enabled the races to be more interesting, other blamed it for poor performance and blistering issues. Pirelli has made an effort to improve on its performance last season. The new tyres have a different construction with a squarer profile. The 4 dry compounds will retain their 2011 name P Zero. The wet compound tyres have been given a new name - Cinturato. This name was first used by Pirelli in F1 in the 1950s.

Pirelli president Marco Tronchetti Provera said, “After the positive experience of last year, the teams asked us to continue providing tyres with the characteristics that contributed to spectacular races in 2011. And this is what we have done, optimising the compounds and profiles in order to guarantee even better and more stable performance, combined with the deliberate degradation that characterised the P Zero range from 2011.”

When asked about his expectations on the 2012 season and the impact of the Pirelli tyres in future races, he said, “We’re expecting unpredictable races, with a wide range of strategies and a number of pit stops: all factors that both competitors and spectators greatly enjoyed last year. The development work on the new compounds took place throughout the 2011 season, thanks to the impressive learning curve and reaction times from our engineers, who are ready to continue those evolutions during the season ahead.”

The new tyres are here and the drivers have been recruited already. All that is left is the unveiling of the cars of all the teams which will be happening thick and fast in the first half of february. 2012 F1 season promises to be exciting indeed.