Pirelli: The new range of P Zero tires debuts in Melbourne

The new era of F1 kicked off today with a new tire innovation. For free practice, in fact, the Teams will have an additional set of tires available: it will be the harder compound of the two chosen for the race and can only be used in the first 30 minutes of FP1. This new regulation produced an increase in laps on track: a total of 937 for both sessions today.

There's also new tires for Saturday: during qualifying, in fact, each car will have an extra set of the softer compound available. This can only be used in Q3; after which it must be returned to Pirelli.

Teams that do not access Q3 will, however, be able to use it for the race.

So, this year all teams have a total of 13 sets of slick tires available for each race instead of the 11 provided last year.

During this morning's free practice, neither the P Zero White medium nor the P Zero Yellow soft, the combination chosen for the Australian Grand Prix, experienced blistering or graining; while the performance difference between the two compounds was around two seconds.

For this morning's FP1, the teams only used medium tyres, before switching to soft tires halfway through the second session.

With all the changes to this year's single-seaters, the teams tried to complete as many laps as possible on both compounds and with different fuel loads, in order to determine their race pace.

The climatic conditions remained dry and hot for both sessions, with a peak during FP2 of 24 degrees ambient and 40° for the asphalt.

For tomorrow and Sunday there is a risk of rain, this means that the Cinturato Green intermediate and the Cinturato Blue full wet could be used for the first time.

Pirelli Motorsport Director, Paul Hembery, commented: “From what we have been able to see so far, we are satisfied with both the performance and degradation of the medium and soft tyres, which have been completely renewed for this season. The degradation of the medium tire is very low, while that of the soft is slightly higher. We saw neither blistering nor graining all day, and there were even a few marbles; therefore, we achieved our goal. The new regulation regarding tires has worked well so far: fans have, in fact, seen more cars on the track. And that's what we wanted."