Ed Straw

It's always worth remembering that when Pirelli did come in, that was the first ever ground up control tyre F1 had had.

They'd been single make, single suppliers before, but obviously when Bridgestone took that over, that was an ongoing programme.

So it was tyre war technology going into it and other times when it was Goodyear...

That was still stuff they developed against Aprilia or whoever.

So actually, it's always worth remembering that that's the first time it's ground up where you're actually saying, actually, what do we want these tyres to do?

And as the following 15 odd years have told us, it's very, very, very difficult because everything's moving.

It's moving targets.

Teams will adapt and teams will find ways to optimise, which will go against quite often what you want to try and achieve.

I know they did do some things technically to try and do that.

There's some things you can put into it.

But it wasn't that – it wasn't very easy to do.

They did have – because initially, if you remember, we drifted well beyond this particular race.

But early on, they had loads of marbles, didn't they?

Remember driving?

I remember Paul D'Aresta getting very angry about getting hit in the sort of knuckles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they were sort of falling apart in the literal sense there.

So, yeah, it's –

It's actually a really interesting trajectory because there's lots of forks in the road there that have taken us to where we are now.

And a lot of those sort of foundational assumptions about what you do with what your tyre objectives, etc.