Paul Hembery says he was “very happy” with Pirelli’s performance in 2011 despite some complaints about them being too conservative as the season progressed.
Pirelli returned to Formula One last year, replacing Bridgestone as the sport’s sole tyre supplier.
It was an interesting season for the Italian tyre manufacturer, who had praise heaped on them when the high degradation of their rubber resulted in exciting grands prix with mixed strategies.
However, in the latter stages of the campaign, which also saw the introduction of DRS and the return of KERS, Pirelli came in for some stick for what some deemed to be a more conservative approach.
“We accept that we were part of that package and it’s hard to divide out all the factors from the three technologies,” Hembrey, Pirelli’s motorsport boss, told Autosport.
“At the end of the season it was quite strange sometimes to be criticised for being conservative. When we started the year we had everybody saying we had pushed it too far the other way.
“I think overall we are very happy and we need to try and replicate that in 2012.
“It was very hard to do [to create tyres to a multi-pits top format]. People don’t understand how difficult. If you get it wrong and the tyres lasted say 200km then you are back to one change per race. To give the three tyre stops that we were asked to do meant that we had a lot of work to do.
“Twenty circuits, 12 different chassis and 24 drivers to try and balance that out with only four compounds was extremely difficult.”
Pirelli, though, are making changes to their compounds ahead of this year’s campaign, conducting some testing during the final few Friday practices of 2011.
“The hard, medium and soft compounds are changing,” Hembrey said. “We are making the performance differences between them much closer together and faster as well.
“We’ve changed the profile on the rear tyre and done a bit of work on the construction to try and get a little bit more footprint because we assume, maybe incorrectly, that there will be a little less downforce in 2012 – at least at the start of the season.
“But with the knowledge we now have, because not every circuit was known to us before F1, then we can make more aggressive compound selections for each race.
“Martin Whitmarsh gave a comment in Brazil when he said he wants Pirelli to challenge us again and push the barriers so that’s what we will be trying to do.”
