Barrichello: Narrow tyres hurting F1

The 2010 regulation changes were widely criticised after the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix where overtaking proved near impossible.

Several drivers complained of not being able to follow another car closely enough to attempt to overtake, and Barrichello reckons it is largely caused by the narrow front tyres.

"You follow another car and you just understeer off the track," he said. "Unless you have at least a second on board, which is not the normal thing - I overtook [Sebastien] Buemi but I was doing 2m01s, he was doing 2m04s and it wasn't an easy overtake.

"You cannot follow, the front of the car washes out. When you grab the throttle back on with lots of lock, you lose the back end so the car in front just goes away. Sometimes I am a bit critical of things, but when I heard they will make the front tyres smaller, I just didn't understand it. The fact that we had better racing last year was because we dropped the ugly grooved tyres, to slicks. We need, more mechanical grip, to be able to lose the aerodynamics.

"It's not the weakness of the tyre, it's the weakness of the rule, in my opinion. Bridgestone has proved it has tyres capable. The front tyre is weaker than last year and the rear tyres are of course better. You need more mechanical grip, for me it's the only solution. They're going to argue that the car will go two seconds faster. But then you drop the performance on the aerodynamics again."

One suggestion has been to increase the disparity between the two available compounds of tyre, to ensure that the speed difference between cars is enough to allow overtaking. But Barrichello says the solution is not that simple.

"In theory that's what they're planning to have - that's why they bring tyres that are not close together. But the engineers are so clever that we're still going round within three or four tenths. If you're talking about two seconds from one tyre to the other, then you have overtaking. A minimum of laps on each tyre might be one thing.

"It is a difficult task, because if we make a tyre that's two seconds slower, but then we get to a place that's 10 degrees cooler, we'd never get the temperature and it's dangerous to go out.

"I can only say from what I saw inside, which is that it's very dodgy to follow a car because you don't have front tyres capable of maintaining the car on the road."