Ferrari: Tire Management Crucial in Hot Race Day Conditions

Ferrari expects tire management in hot conditions to be crucial in today’s FIA World Endurance Championship race at Monza with track temperatures set to reach 122 degrees F (50 degrees C).

The manufacturer’s GT and sports cars race and testing manager told reporters after Antonio Fuoco’s second place in qualifying that it will be hard to balance the challenge of warming up non-heated tires with keeping them consistent over a double stint.

Hypercar teams have four and a half sets of slick tires for use in qualifying and the six-hour race. Michelin has brought its hard and medium compounds, while the ban on pre-heating that was reversed for the 24 Hours of Le Mans is now back in place.

“We need to manage the tires really well,” said Giuliano Salvi.

“It will be quite a lot in the hands of the drivers because how you manage the corners is crucial to extend your stint.

“It is a balance between the restart on the warmup and the dual fact that you need to do some long stints here in 52-53 degrees [C]. It will be new also for us because we tested here but the track was 25 degrees.

“We are learning day by day and sometimes it goes well, like at Le Mans, but here it will be tough.

“The field is very packed because Peugeot was really quick. We saw in the corners they were pretty good, and they were good in Le Mans before they crashed.

“Cadillac is very good. Porsche maybe a bit less from what we saw in FP2. It will be a tight race, really a sprint.”

High temperatures were seen on the Sunday of Le Mans and during the 6 Hours of Portimao, where the Ferrari 499Ps took a conservative approach to tire wear but then expressed that it could have pushed harder.

Monza has more straights than Portimao, potentially aiding tire life, although Salvi noted that the Italian circuit is “very asymmetric” in that wear is unevenly distributed between each side of the car.

“The left side is very much affected,” he said. “The right side is not that affected, and if you have a yellow flag or restart, it can be very critical to put temperature in the tires.”

“Basically the crucial session of the weekend was FP2 because the other two were much cooler. We are quite happy, but we had Full Course Yellows, probably like in the race.

“If you imagine a green race where you push for a full 60 laps, it will be interesting that maybe you can touch the cliff [of the tire].

“We expect even higher degrees of track temperature. It will be the second part of the second stint [that] will be interesting and challenging. It will be a tough race.”

Ferrari feels that it has a top speed deficit to the Toyota GR010 Hybrids, which posted better figures than the Italian cars in qualifying.

Salvi said that Ferrari’s strategy was to follow the Toyotas out of the pits and try to catch their slipstream down the long Monza straights, in order to “cope with the deficit.”

“We are struggling with top speed in the moment,” Salvi assessed. “In all the corners we are pretty fine [but] we are just losing on the straights compared to the competitors.

“But I think we optimize our package [and] in terms of quali it wasn’t a big problem. The drivers were happy.”