Pirelli has revealed the cause of Hamilton and Sainz's punctures

      After two months, Pirelli has released the results of its investigation into the tire punctures on the cars of Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz at the Qatar Grand Prix. During the December race at the Losail circuit, the Mercedes and Ferrari cars suffered a front left tire puncture a few seconds apart. Initially it was assumed that Lewis and Carlos damaged the tire, driving on the starting straight on the debris of the rearview mirror of the car Alex Elbon, but this version was rejected a few days later, after studying the telemetry data, which showed that the tires and Hamilton and Sainz were on the verge of destruction before hitting the debris.

      Finding a definitive answer as to what exactly caused the tire damage took months of studying the rubber residue at Pirelli's Milan base, and the results were presented to the F1 teams on Monday at a working group meeting involving Pirelli and FIA representatives. Pirelli engineers concluded that last year's punctures were unrelated to the 2023 punctures, which were caused by cuts on the sharp edges of the running boards. Pirelli explained that the tires on Hamilton's and Sainz's cars were damaged by excessive wear as the drivers exceeded their expected tire life. The unique feature of the Qatar circuit - high grip and smooth asphalt - meant that the tires were subject to little thermal degradation but were subject to heavy wear. In addition, the high speeds combined with the track configuration put extreme stress on the front left tire. As a result, teams have to decide how much distance they are willing to run on one set of tires before the tires reach the 100% wear limit, when tire failure becomes likely. During the Qatar sprint, when the cars had about a third of a full load of fuel in their tanks, some teams found that 100% wear was already occurring after 19 laps.

      Problems for Hamilton and Sainz occurred on lap 35 of the 57-lap race, when both drivers tried to extend the first segment in case the virtual or real safety car was activated to clear debris from Elbon's car off the track. The investigation's findings point to the fact that changes Pirelli made to the tire design after the 2023 race avoided the cuts. The cuts occurred because teams were over-tightening their segments on the same set of tires. This is likely to force the FIA and Pirelli to take new steps to prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future, and it is unlikely that the FIA will limit the maximum distance that can be run on one set. Pirelli is likely to bring a step softer tire to Qatar next time. This ensures that the rubber will lose efficiency due to thermal degradation long before the tires reach maximum wear.