F1: Verstappen offers to help Pirelli make better full-wet tire

The delays in the start of Sunday’s Japanese Grand Prix have reignited debate over whether Pirelli’s full wet-weather tires work well enough.

Pirelli’s current intermediate tire performing much better than the extremes over a wider range of track conditions.

After the rain event at Suzuka, in the post-race press conference, the drivers were asked about the current rain tires.

Verstappen said he would be more than happy to work with Pirelli to try some new ideas to improve things, like a new tread design.

“I didn’t want to attack everyone, but I think we need better rain tires,” said the Dutchman. “If you saw what we could do with the amount of water on the track in the ’90s or early 2000s.

“I’m really looking forward to having a few days of testing and trying out all kinds of tire types. But we need better rain tires because I think the extremes are just slow and they don’t really drain a lot of water.

“That’s why everyone always tries to switch to an intermediate very quickly because it’s just so much faster per lap.

“You saw it from lap to lap, we went from extreme to Inter today and immediately went at least five seconds faster and that’s just too big. And that’s why no one really wants to go to such extremes.”

“If it was raining like the red flag and you had extreme tires I think it would still be very difficult to drive,” he said.

“But if you compare that to 20 years ago, that would have been perfectly fine. So there has to be a solution.

“But that’s not criticism, because I’m very happy to help. We should look into that.

“Maybe we can just organize more days of wet testing and work together to try to find better tires to at least have the opportunity to really ride in the wet and not always just do two laps at an extreme, switch to intermediate and call it a wet race because a wet race is usually run in heavy rain.”

Leclerc Feels Visibility must be improved

“I think a big problem of these cars is just the visibility,” added Leclerc.

“So whatever we can do to try and improve the visibility and minimize the spray, especially behind the cars, this will be hugely beneficial because I believe that sometimes we can actually run for the conditions of the track but just because of the visibility, because it’s so dangerous being behind, and you don’t see anything, that we end up not running at all.

“But yeah, we should try and find a solution, for some reason, to try and minimize the spray.”