Pirelli tyres not to blame for Ferrari slump

Whilst Sebastian Vettel’s and Red Bull’s recent dominance might coincide with the Pirelli tyre changes following the British Grand Prix.

Ferrari are not using that as an excuse for their end-of-season slump in performance.

After the ludicrous scenario that the Formula One world witnessed at Silverstone, Pirelli changed the make-up of their tyres and changed to the old design 2012 tyres with the current 2013 rubber compound.

With the tyres over the past couple of season so crucial to a teams performance, any change was going to be a positive to some teams and a negative to other teams.

Whilst Red Bull and Mercedes appeared to be the big winners following the alterations, the likes of Ferrari, Lotus and Force India appeared to be the big losers.

But whilst Ferrari may have a ready made excuse for why Fernando Alonso has not been able to mount a serious challenge for the Formula One World Championship, the Maranello based team have refused to blame the tyres.

‘It would be somewhat superficial to blame the tyres as the only reason for our decrease in performance. We also took some development steps that were not as strong and didn’t work,’ Ferrari’s chief designer Nikolas Tombazis told Autosport Magazine.

Tombazis instead pointed the finger at Ferrari’s Windtunnel, something that the team have spent several months updating and are now close to re-opening.

‘Windtunnel technology has been a weak point for us, compared to our competitors. We had some problems with our flow quality so it was not as uniform as it should be and we could not run as big a model as we would have liked.

‘Our data and instrumentation was quite outdated so we couldn’t do that many runs and experiments per day, which was a bit of a drawback.’