Verstappen Offers Himself for Wet Tyre Testing to Help Pirelli Improve Full Wet Compound

Max Verstappen says he would be willing to help out Pirelli by running some wet weather tests for them if it means a better full wet tyre comes out of it at the end.

The past two Grand Prix in Singapore and Japan have both seen rain, and conditions have seen red flags and delays as standing water ran the risk of aquaplaning.

The race in Japan, in particular, highlighted just how poor the full wet tyre is that Pirelli has supplied, with everyone jumping to the intermediate tyre quickly even though conditions were far from ideal to run that compound.  The full wet was just falling away from its optimum operating window too quickly, and they were not doing the job they were designed to do for the conditions.

Verstappen went on to dominate at the Suzuka International Racing Course and in doing so clinched his second World Drivers’ Championship title, but the Oracle Red Bull Racing driver feels Pirelli need to do something to make their full wet tyre option work in a wider range of conditions so drivers can make good use of it more often on the racetrack.

“I didn’t want to take a dig out of everyone but I think we need better rain tyres,” Verstappen is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “If you saw what we could do in the ’90s or the early 2000s, with the amount of water on the track.

“I’m very happy to have a few test days and try all different kinds of tyres. But we need better rain tyres because I think the extremes are just slow and they can’t really carry a lot of water away. That’s why everyone always tries to switch very quickly to an intermediate because it’s just so much faster per lap.

“You could see from one to the other lap, we went from the extreme to the inter today and we immediately went five seconds at least faster and that is just too big. And that’s why nobody really wants to run that extreme.”

Verstappen feels there must be a solution to the problem that surrounds the full wet tyre, and he looks back twenty years to races that ran in much wetter conditions without any trouble.

“When it rained like it did when the red flag came out, and you would have put extreme tyres on, I think it would still be really difficult to drive,” Verstappen added.  “But then if you compare that to 20 years ago, that would have been perfectly fine. So there must be a solution.

“But this is not criticism because I’m very happy to help out. We should look into it. Maybe we can just organise more tests days in the wet and work together, to try and find better tyres to at least have an opportunity to really drive in the wet and not always only drive like two laps on an extreme, switch to intermediate and call it a wet race because a wet race is also normally driven with heavy rain.”