Max Verstappen says last weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix shows Formula 1 needs better wet weather tyres – and he’s willing to help develop them.
Just 28 out of a planned 53 laps of last weekend’s race were run, due to heavy rain. But sespite wet conditions at the start of the race, all 20 drivers chose to start on the intermediate tyre, which have cannot disperse as much water as the full wet tyre.
Verstappen said this is because the performance of the full wet tyre isn’t good enough. When the race was restarted behind the Safety Car all drivers were required to use the full wet tyre, but many pitted to have intermediates fitted soon after the Safety Car came in.
“The [full wets] are just slow and they can’t really carry a lot of water away,” said Verstappen. “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 [full wet] to the inter and we went immediately five seconds at least faster and that is just too big.
“That’s why nobody really wants to run that [full wet] and when it rained like it did when the red flag came out, you would have put [full wet] tyres on I think it would still be really difficult to drive.”
Verstappen believes the wet weather tyres used when his father Jos raced in F1 – when there was still competition between multiple tyre suppliers – were more effective.
“I don’t want to take a dig out of everyone but I think we need better rain tyres,” said Verstappen. “If you saw what we could do in the nineties or the early 2000s with the amount of water on the track.”
He suspects it would have been “perfectly fine” to race in the conditions seen at Suzuka last weekend using the tyres which were available 20 years ago. “There must be a solution,” he continued.
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“Like I said, this is not a criticism because I’m very happy to help out and really 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.”
“I’m very happy to have a few test days and try all different kinds of tyres but we need better rain tyres,” he added.
Verstappen believes F1 cars used to race in wetter conditions than they did last weekend. “[We need] to at least have an opportunity to really drive in the wet and not always only drive like two laps on a [full wet], switch to…
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