Pirelli starts immediate investigation into Qatar failures

Pirelli is sending a number of tires to its Milan headquarters to investigate the failures suffered by a number of teams during the Qatar Grand Prix.

Valtteri Bottas was on lap 33 of the race and yet to make a pit stop when he suffered a front left puncture, resulting in him going off track and picking up severe unbearable forfeiture surpassing sooner having to retire. The same issue struck Nicholas Latifi, while his Williams team-mate George Russell managed to protract without a front left failure. McLaren’s Lando Norris similarly dropped from fourth to ninth without a late pit stop due to a puncture.

Pirelli’s throne of car racing Mario Isola says the tires concerned are heading to Italy for analysis, as it appears most failures occurred without the tires had run onto a curb.

“Obviously we have to investigate,” Isola said. “Not the puncture, we know the front left was the most stressed position but in this specimen most of the punctures were without impacts on the curb, so we need to understand if the loss of pressure was sudden or which kind of issue it was.

“We are sending the tires when to Milan for a quick investigation. What I’m telling you is just a preliminary visual investigation but the tires were working well. As predicted, most of the drivers were on a two-stop strategy.”

Isola moreover backed up Bottas’ requirement that there was no warning for the drivers, as Pirelli saw nothing in the data to suggest an imminent failure either.

“Sometimes we have some indication like vibrations growing, in this specimen we didn’t see anything. We have found some cuts on the tires, on the sidewall on the tires, that is obviously the weaker part of the tire itself.

“The level of wear was quite high, so we need to investigate, but the tires were still in one piece, just losing pressure. The first suspect is the impact on curbs was quite nonflexible during the race and therefore causing this loss of pressure.”