Back in January, Pirelli came out and said that F1 cars would be faster in 2015 than they were a year before, and now they have hard data backing them up.
All it took was one race in order to prove that this years’ cars are faster than they were in 2014, even though the same couldn’t have been said for every team because of obvious technical reasons. Yes, we’re talking about McLaren.
Pirelli said that a new rear tire construction was partially responsible for some of the cars being around two seconds per hap faster last weekend in Melbourne than they were last year.
Lewis Hamilton was the fastest man on the track, lapping the circuit in 1:30.945s which was 1.5 seconds quicker than what his previous generation Mercedes was capable of.
Paul Hembery, Pirelli’s motorsport director was quoted as saying that “These figures underline what we expected to see following pre-season testing: a significant reduction in lap times, with cars that will only get faster as the year goes on,” while also adding that “We could even see some lap records on certain circuits. With this in mind, we have introduced evolutions to the rear structure of all our 2015 tyres this year, in order to give them greater capability in handling the extreme demands placed on them.”
We’re looking forward to seeing old lap records fall, especially on tracks such as Spa, Marina Bay in Singapore, the Circuit of The Americas in the U.S and Interlagos in Brazil – with Singapore (current version) being a strong candidate, as Lewis Hamilton’s 2014 time of 1:50.417 was about 1.8 seconds short of the all-time record set by Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull back in 2013.
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