Pirelli chief responds to Vettel’s tyre criticism

Pirelli’s head of F1 has defended their tyres after they came in for criticism from Sebastian Vettel following the Monaco Grand Prix.

Given the conditions in Monte Carlo, every driver started on the wet tyres but were all waiting for the earliest opportunity to switch over to the inters.

AlphaTauri’s Pierre Gasly was the first to swap and noticeably struggled for grip for the first few laps on his new tyres, but his decision was eventually proven correct as the rest of the field pitted for the same tyre.

Four-time World Champion Vettel has explained there was an eagerness to move onto the inters as the rain tyre is “basically useless.”

“As soon as you can go on the intermediate, you do it,” Vettel is reported as saying by motorsport-magazin.com.

“The rain tyres are far too hard for this track and even for Imola they were too hard.

“In rainy weather, we know that the current cars have a lot of aquaplaning. Pirelli hasn’t worked on this subject for years and everyone knows it. So we have to wait until it stops raining to be able to launch a race.

“I remember the days when we could have driven here in the rain, with no problem with this amount of water, but with these tyres it is impossible.

“Looking at them, the ‘extreme wet’ looks good but in fact they’re useless. As soon as you can switch to intermediate, you do it straight away.”

Sebastian Vettel on Pirelli's extreme wet tyres: "They are way too hard for this track [Monaco], but it was the same at Imola too. It's just a bad tyre."

— Junaid #JB17 (@JunaidSamodien_) May 30, 2022

However, Pirelli’s head of F1 Mario Isola has disagreed with Vettel’s assessment and insisted that the wet and intermediate tyres were similar in terms of hardness. He also said their tests showed