Pirelli: Production defects not behind Qatar GP tyre deflations

Pirelli has published initial conclusions from the ongoing analysis it is carrying out on the tyres that deflated during last month’s Qatar Grand Prix. The tyre maker states that these conclusions “exclude any production defects.”

Based on the findings obtained so far, Pirelli sees the origin of the problem as “mainly due to the amount of time these tyres were run on the kerbs, at high speed and with considerable lateral and vertical loads.” The F1 tyre supplier considers this a situation “unique to the Losail circuit” and says the heavy demand caused by running over these kerbs, which isn’t possible to measure from the data available before the race, damaged the tyre construction and led to a loss of pressure in the internal sidewall. This consequently caused the structure to collapse after several seconds.

The tyre issues affected Valtteri Bottas, Lando Norris, George Russell and Nicholas Latifi. All four suffered front-left punctures; Bottas was racing on medium compound tyres at the time, the others on hard compound.

Pirelli says it has shared all the technical details of the analysis carried out so far with the FIA and the teams.