Pirelli chosen over Hankook for 2020-23 F1 tyre supply deal

2020 F1 season

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Pirelli has been chosen over Hankook as Formula 1’s official tyre supplier for the 2020 to 2023 seasons, as RaceFans revealed yesterday.

The Italian tyre manufacturer has been F1’s sole provider of tyres since 2011. Under its new deal, F1 will switch from 13-inch wheels to an 18-inch format in 2021. Pirelli presented an example of the new format in the paddock at Yas Marina.

F1 CEO Chase Carey said the extension of Pirelli’s contract “guarantees a long-term stable future for such a crucial component of Formula 1”.

Pirelli and rival tyre manufacturer Hankook were accepted by the FIA as bidders for the F1 tyre contract. The final choice of supplier was made by Formula One Management.

FIA president Jean Todt said he is “happy to have Pirelli appointed for another period as official tyre supplier to the FIA Formula 1 world championship.

It will allow all of us to enjoy the experience gained since 2011. We know how crucial and difficult is the role of the tyre supplier and, particularly, in Formula 1.”

Pirelli vice president and CEO Mario Tronchetti Provera welcomed the extension of Pirelli’s F1 tyre contract. “This new agreement extends our presence to a total of 13 seasons in the modern era, with Pirelli also present in 1950, when the world championship was inaugurated.

“Formula 1 is and will remain the pinnacle of motorised competition: the perfect environment for Pirelli, which has always defined motorsport as its most advanced technological research and development laboratory.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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19 comments on “Pirelli chosen over Hankook for 2020-23 F1 tyre supply deal”

  1. Good news, everyone!

    :P

    1. It’s the Dacia Sandero

      1. @ahxshades – man, I miss them!

  2. It’s probably better for Hankook not to be involved in F1. I’m always going to look at Pirelli tyres now and think “is that the one that blisters after 40 miles, or a the one that explodes when it’s nearly home?” :-)

    1. Or the one that needs an insane amount of warming (or cooling) just to work properly?

    2. And imagine the groanworthy puns we might have otherwise been subject to – spin the tyres up too hard and the commentators would go “He’s Hankooked those tyres”.

    3. And yet the Pirelli Tropheo R tyre is the best road legal performance tyre there is.

  3. Doesn’t really matter whether its Hankook or Pirelli. As long as F1 asks for silly high degradation tires they will deliver.
    That leads me to another thought. The high rev NA engines are often bashed for not being road relevant or green but everybody agrees they are good for the show. Right now F1 uses tires for a show effect, that are neither road relevant nor green. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    1. @d0senbrot, those high revving NA engines were only claimed to be “good for the show” in retrospect – like so many different parts of the sport, they were often derided during the period they were used, but given the tendency of the fan base to react badly to change, they then clung onto idealised memories of those engines when the new engines came in because that was what they’d grown up with and therefore what they thought the sport should be about.

      1. My thoughts on that are a bit different. I feel at the end of the V10 era, there were 7 competitive engine options. There were 3-4 teams with a shot to win any given weekend, but the engine performance was not a decisive factor.

        In 2013, you were down to 3 competitive engines, from 4 available. The other was limited, and that hampered its effectiveness, or else you may have had 4.

        In the time from 2014 to present – only this year, specifically, have you had a second engine actually be competitive as evidenced in the midfield battle. Although I believe Ferrari was closing ground in 2017, and was competitive at times, it was not consistently on the level of the Mercedes. Renault, and Honda are far from being on par still.

        F1 allows only a sole supplier. Safety concerns dictate that is best. One way to quickly improve the show is to allow multiple suppliers. This is because they will inevitably push the edge to beat each other. It’s not sustainable long term, and it definitely creates safety issues as inevitably lap times fall and someone steps over the edge. I seem to remember watching several Michelin clad cars have failures at ~270 kph at Indianapolis. Spectacularly bad crashes.

        The high rev NA V10 engines were claimed to be too expensive- and so the formula was changed to keep roughly the same configuration, with 2 less cylinders. Should reduce cost by 20%…. simply not realistic because it was never going to be that simple, and development to try and beat the competition was never going to end. The retooling, the differences, the redesign, it increased costs across the board. The Hybrid V6, was to cut costs, and make the cars more road relevant – we see where that’s gone!

        Ultimately, it’s about leaving things alone long enough for convergence to naturally equalize things, if you want to have better racing. At the same time, you have to reduce the impact of Aerodynamic wake. Otherwise, you have NASCAR, which is as much “follow the leader” as F1. Only way to pass is if you have a tire advantage because “clean air” is crucial!

        Neither of those is good for the front running, big budget teams, so you will not see true caps and cost-cutting measures to make the sport more competitive anytime soon.

        The tires, providing a high degradation, and the advantage to a new set will continue to occasionally provide some artificial excitement infused j to the show when a team blunders on when to make their stop. Otherwise, it’s going to continue to be follow the leader.

        1. Hybrids will always be more relevant than a bunch of V10 NAs. So good riddance to them, do not miss them at all despite growing up watching them in F1.

        2. William Stox, I would disagree with quite a few of those assertions.

          Firstly, with regards to your statement that “at the end of the V10 era, there were 7 competitive engine options. There were 3-4 teams with a shot to win any given weekend, but the engine performance was not a decisive factor.” – were there really 3-4 teams consistently in with a shot of winning at any one weekend during the late V10 era?

          That was certainly not the case in 2005, for example: yes, technically three manufacturers won that season, but only because of the farce that was the 2005 US GP – every other single race was a two horse race between Renault and McLaren. 2004 and 2002 were not exactly that diverse either, being some of the most dominant years ever in the history of the sport – maybe, at a push, you could claim 2003 fits that definition, but more normally you saw just a couple of teams dominate the sport in that era.

          I’d also strongly debate whether you really had “7 competitive engine options” – if you were an independent team, most of those engines were not for sale. You either had to pay extremely high figures (at the time, Prost and Sauber were paying in the order of $30 million for engines) for a chance of a slightly older engine, or you bought the Cosworth units – which were cheaper, but there was a reason they were cheaper (because they were not competitive).

          Realistically, there were probably only about 3 or 4 engines that I would saw were that competitive – Ferrari, Mercedes, Renault and BMW – and even then that was not consistently the case all of the time. Mercedes, for example, were set back by several years when beryllium alloys were banned, whilst Renault were only successful once they ditched the ultra wide angle engine they used and BMW took several years to catch up as well – that wasn’t the case throughout most of the V10 era.

  4. Good news. It would’ve been entirely non-sensical for Hankook to join given that it’d be nothing but a waste of time and money for them.

  5. What a disaster, they continue with the worst neumatics they’ll ever participate in f1.

  6. I think that is the first picture I’ve seen of the two wheels close together and the difference is rather more dramatic. The changes to aero, suspension and brakes are going to be major which could well catch a few teams out.

    Mind you, I’d prefer it if they got rid of the three things behind the wheels…

    1. mrfill, and then what?

      That is the thing – you cry for change, but don’t seem to know what you really want to change to: all you can do is define yourself in your opposition to something.

      We saw how people moaned about Mosely, for example, and demanded that he be driven out of the FIA, but nobody had the faintest idea whom to replace him with. We’re seeing it again when people rail against Todt – if you then ask them “OK, who do you want running the sport?”, they’ll go “I don’t know” because they’ve not thought that far ahead and have no clear vision for what they want – only a set of incoherent and ill defined wishes, and no idea about how they want to implement that on a practical level or whom they want to take charge afterwards.

  7. Bad call. Drivers hate them and the fans hate them.. Yeah yeah yeah it is not their fualt F1 asked them to build tyres this way.. BS! Did F1 ask them to build tyres that dangerously fall apart, require compond changes in season and PSI changes during a race weekend?

    1. Yes. They design to F1’s specifications. And if F1 was unhappy with them, they wouldn’t have gone with them again would they?

  8. Clearly F1 doesn’t like change! ;-)

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