F1 ’must be careful’ with 2017 changes - Hembery

Paul Hembery has played down claims that Pirelli was behind the reported watering-down of planned radical chassis changes for 2017.

Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko, though, blames Mercedes.

"Mercedes claims that the tyres would not cope," Austrian media reports quote him as saying, "but this is a poor excuse.

"They are in a position of advantage and naturally don’t want anything to change."

Reportedly, Pirelli was also opposed to the original plans, where significantly higher aerodynamic loads may have proved too much for the tyres to cope without dramatically increasing pressures.

Hembery, Pirelli’s F1 chief, denies that.

"We can make a tyre that can withstand any load we want, but it will not be the same as today," he is quoted by Italy’s Autosprint.

"An increase of 50 or 60 per cent (downforce) will not see the type of tyres we have used in recent seasons."

Hembery suggested that trying to spice up F1 through aerodynamics is not the right road to take.

"I remember when we came into F1, Ross Brawn was the head of the working group for tyres and one of the first things he said was ’We do not want faster cornering’.

"So we need to be careful. People need to understand that performance in formula one is already very high and an increase of 5 seconds (per laps in pace) is huge. We must be sure that we go in the right direction," he insisted.

Another issue, he explained, is that Pirelli needs to do much more testing in order to prepare for the 2017 changes, and currently the teams are not in agreement about how it should be done.