The extra change F1 should make for 2019

Ahead of the German Grand Prix, the FIA quietly issued its tyre tender document for the 2020-2024 season, with a ban on tyre blankets, narrower front wheels and low-profile tyres set out as Formula 1's future. It could spice up the show, but arguably the changes could be brought in even earlier.

Through the years, the demands on what the tyres need to withstand has changed dramatically. Since Pirelli became sole supplier in 2011, it has been under tremendous scrutiny - particularly after the tyre failures at Silverstone in '13. But all the way through drivers have complained about not being able to push as hard as they want to because temperatures are so critical to tyre management.

The final year of Pirelli's F1 supply deal is 2019, and I'm sure the company will be pitching to carry on into the next decade. Once you're involved and have the infrastructure in place to meet the service requirements, you are best placed to continue.

Pirelli has said it's not willing to get into a bidding war and will only continue on a similar financial basis to its current deal. But, when it comes to the next contract, the FIA is asking for a series of incremental changes to tyre specifications.

For any supplier, this is the most expensive way of doing anything. Constant change is expensive and you need to keep developing in many different directions. Again, this is expensive.

In 2020, the plan is to remain with more or less the specification that we will end up with in '19. Then, for '21, to coincide with a major chassis regulation change, the plan is to use 18-inch diameter wheel rims with slightly narrower front tyres - reduced by 35mm to 270mm. There will also be larger-diameter front and rear tyres and the outlawing of tyre blankets.

As part of the new technical regulations in 2021, there is a plan to move the car's weight distribution rearward by around 3%. That's why the front tyre is going to be narrower. This will also have a major aerodynamic effect, and because of the narrower front tyre there will be an increase in overall downforce.

The introduction of 18-inch rims is a change that will open up a whole new can of worms. For the teams, this will be a major change as it will mean that for the same overall vertical and lateral stiffness the reduced tyre sidewall will, in effect, move less and the suspension will be able to set up to move more.

With more space due to the 18-inch rims, internal brake ducting could really get elaborate

This is a positive because the teams will be able to control that movement so expect to see some interesting suspension devices appearing.

What happens inside that extra volume that the 18-inch diameter wheels creates will also be interesting. If the regulations don't control this area well enough we could again see some unorthodox solutions.

Could we see suspension units (dampers) going from inside the chassis to inside the wheels? With more space, the internal brake ducting could really get elaborate as the teams try to get some of the heated brake cooling airflow out to the inner diameter of the rims to help heat up the tyres once tyre blankets are banned.

If the regulations don't control this area well enough we could again see some unusual interpretations with lots of Technical Directives going back and forward between the teams and the FIA.

The biggest change for 2021's tyres is the ban on tyre blankets. This has been proposed many times over the past decade or so but has never gained real traction. It has never been accepted because the drivers feel that on the out laps the cars had no grip, while the teams rejected it because it was more expensive both in terms of finance and time to have to do an extra warm-up lap.

A top funded team will do around 700 kilometres per car per race weekend, and that with the current 21 races and testing that means a season total of something like 35,000km.

So, with a budget of say £350million that's £1,000 per kilometre, or on a 5km track £5,000 per lap. Yes, F1 is expensive and that extra lap per outing will be costly, but we currently see the drivers doing very slow laps to cool the tyres so it will just disappear into the overall requirement of a session's runplan.

There is also the saving on tyre blanket shipping costs to take into account. Each team will probably have a least 30 sets of blankets, and control systems with most of them, all plugged in warming tyres up for the three days of the weekend. So not having them will be a major environmental saving as well.

Each set of blankets has the capacity to use something like 7kW of electricity, or about half of the power it takes to run a normal house in the dead of winter. Multiply that by 30 sets and 10 teams all powered by huge diesel generators and it's a significant figure.

When you consider that Pirelli also supplies the tyres for the F2 and GP3 cars, which don't use tyre blankets, it shows it knows how to make tyres that can work satisfactorily from low temperatures.

These less experienced drivers can leave the pits with the tyres cold and manage them up to temperature without crashing at the first opportunity (well, most of them anyway). So, F1 could easily ban tyre blankets for next season.

Even the drivers are saying banning tyre blankets would definitely bring something to the show. So why not do it for 2019 when, other than changes to the front wing, the cars are more or less staying the same?

Another thing that could be implemented for 2019 and onwards would be control of how many people are involved in a pitstop

There are many other requirements from the tyre specification and I'm surprised that the FIA feels the need to define the demands in such detail.

Perhaps it would have been better to allow the potential tyre suppliers to put forward their individual proposals and suggestions. Basically, all the viewer wants is tyres that have a performance difference between compounds, work as a qualifying tyre for one lap and then are consistently about a second slower so that the drivers can push flat out on them until they basically wear out.

There are various other demands in the tender document. The FIA would like a winter testing tyre, and has set targets for the life of the tyre as follows at 75% of tracks in 2020:

Hard compound: 2s degradation achieved at 22% race distance base lap time

Medium compound: 2s degradation achieved at 18% race distance, 1.2s/lap quicker than hard compound

Soft compound: 2s degradation achieved at 10% race distance, 2.2s/lap quicker than hard compound

The other thing that needs addressing is the wet tyre and its ability to clear standing water. It rained for FP3 at Hockenhiem and very few cars ran because they wouldn't have enough tyres if qualifying had also been wet because each driver only gets three wet sets and four intermediates - on top of the possibility of an extra set of inters being granted if there's rain on Friday.

And even if they did have enough tyres, there are worries about them aquaplaning on rivers running across a track.

We hear a lot about this 65-litres of water per second pumping capacity of the wet tyres. Well, I did a few sums on that and with 2mm of water at 280km/h the tyre can't cope and starts riding on top of the water.

With 3mm of water, it's down to 195km/h, and at 4mm this reduces to 150km/h. This needs to be improved otherwise wet practice sessions are basically just going to continue to be a no show and the races will suffer from running behind the safety car.

Another thing that could be implemented for 2019 and onwards would be control of how many people are involved in a pitstop. IndyCar car pit stops take roughly 7.5s, with one person on each tyre and a refueller, who also plugs in the airjacks.

It actually looks quite good and because of the increase in time you can watch the pitstop fully and take it in.

F1 could adopt the same, with one person on each wheel, a front and rear jack man and a car control person. Seven mechanics in total would immediately reduce the congestion around the pitstops and make it more of a spectacle that could actually be appreciated by the viewers.

It would also decrease the number of loose wheels we have seen this year, as only one person would be responsible and the car control mechanic would actually be able to visually scan the pitstop more easily.

With the systems that F1 currently has - wheelnuts retained in the wheels and very sophisticated wheelguns and pitstop gantries - I think we would still see pitstops in less than five seconds.

Two-second pitstops are fantastic achievements, but with basically 16 people around the car you actually see nothing.

The Hamilton pit-entry call was a dangerous precedent to set for future infringements

Moving onto the German Grand Prix, it was a great example of how big a difference a day can make in racing. On Saturday, Lewis Hamilton had his head in his hands after a hydraulics failure while Sebastian Vettel was on pole. On Sunday, Hamilton won while Vettel was in the wall.

The Mercedes strategy was a big talking point, but I'm interested in what Ferrari was doing. The strategy calls have generally been excellent from Ferrari this year but it wasted too much time swapping Kimi Raikkonen, who stopped on lap 14 and got into the lead when Vettel pitted on lap 25.

An earlier call could have given Vettel more breathing space when the rain hit, which could have made a difference. But right or wrong call, Vettel still shouldn't have thrown it into the hedge.

Appropriately enough, this was all about the tyres. The ultrasofts struggled with blistering, the softs were about right and the mediums were a tad too hard. The ultrasofts were the tyres to have when it started spitting.

Mercedes and Hamilton made that call before the rain arrived, while Valtteri Bottas, Raikkonen and Max Verstappen all stopped under the safety car for ultras.

Hamilton almost did, but for his trip across the grass after the radio confusion. The stewards investigated it but decided he had broken the rules nicely so there was only a reprimand.

That's a dangerous precedent to set for future infringements of this kind and one that could raise questions when a similar incident happens again.