Gerhard Berger: Pirelli’s 2013 F1 approach incomprehensible

Pirelli tyres

Gerhard Berger has slammed as “incomprehensible” F1 tyre supplier Pirelli’s approach to the 2013 season.

“Last year, the tyres were quite usable,” the former McLaren and Ferrari driver, and ex Toro Rosso co-owner, told the Austrian news agency APA.

“Probably they want to improve the show by providing for one more pitstop (per driver).

“But it cannot be that, having invested millions in the wind tunnels and the engines and the drivers, you go to the track and can’t use the tyre,” said Berger, referring to the recently-concluded winter test season in chilly Spain.

“It’s an unfortunate situation,” he added, acknowledging that the situation could be different at the actual races.

He also acknowledged that tyres have always been a major talking point in F1, but there was often a tyre war, or as Berger described it, a “real game”.

“Now that there is one tyre, it cannot be that it (the tyre factor) governs the entire field,” he insisted.

Berger’s Austrian countryman, the Red Bull team owner Dietrich Mateschitz, agrees.

“It would be good,” he told Blick newspaper, “if we had tyres that did not need to be analysed for days and days.”

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