After the Qatar Grand Prix left many controversies regarding Jorge Martín and his rear tire, Piero Taramasso, CEO of Michelin explained to the press all the doubts and events of the weekend in Qatar, clarifying all the controversies surrounding Jorge Martín’s rear tire at the Losail circuit.
– ‘ Basically, after the race in Qatar, we all saw Jorge’s statements about Michelin. We understood his position, because he’s fighting for the title and with so much adrenaline around him the reaction was normal. We take these kinds of situations very seriously, so the first thing we did was call our manufacturing headquarters in France to find out how the tire was made and we concluded that the tire was in perfect condition. So the answer is “yes”, everything was fine in the manufacture of the tire and the tire was fine. The second step was to analyze the data from the track using the data from Ducati and Pramac who provided us with the data, it’s a lot of data to analyze in three days and last night we concluded with Ducati and Pramac that Jorge’s performance was not in line with what was expected. At the moment we still don’t have a clear answer to explain what happened, we need time to draw conclusions. We’ll analyze Pecco’s data as well and come back with more conclusive information.
Asked if the spinning of the rear tire on Jorge Martín’s start might have influenced the tire’s performance for the rest of the race, Taramasso replied: ‘We haven’t seen the start data yet because we don’t have access to the start system and the mapping of the bike, as I said, we’re still going to draw more conclusions about what happened together with the data from Ducati and Pramac. For sure, the conditions on the asphalt didn’t help either because of the sand and the temperatures, which is why we brought the harder tire to Qatar. Normally there wouldn’t be so much grip in a race like this and there was plenty of grip, so we have to analyze a lot of data and three days isn’t enough to draw conclusions. The data at the moment doesn’t say that it was the tire’s fault because if you look at the first few laps the performance was good, but you look at the last few laps and the temperature and consumption of the tire was very high, but because he (Jorge Martín) was quite late at the start he had to push the tires harder.’
Michelin’s CEO also spoke about the work being done in conjunction with Ducati and Pramac.
– ‘ The first data analysis is done, that is, with our factory in France. Now we’re doing the data analysis with the teams and then there’s the more physical part of the analysis where we’ll open the tire and analyze all the materials that are in the tire. Another important part is the transportation of the tires to each circuit because of the humidity and temperature and in this aspect we have an automatic machine that controls all these situations and the temperature is always controlled.
