Round Three of the Formula One World Championship took the teams to China, with three weeks between this and the Malaysian race the teams would have been busy trying to further understand their 2013 challengers and Pirelli's latest offering.

Pirelli and its tyres has been a topic of conversation up and down the paddock over the first few races with seemingly everyone having their own take on whether the tyres application are good for the sport or not.

I thought I'd weigh in on the topic from my own and a more technical perspective:

Pirelli has altered the construction of its tyres for this season and although perhaps unintentionally it has not only changed the way the teams have to approach setup to harness downforce vs mechanical grip but also the feedback the driver gets from the car.

The 2013 tyres feature a less rigid sidewall and reinforced tread pattern, this works to maximise the contact patch available, increasing the amount of mechanical grip the tyre is willing to give up.

This makes selecting tyre pressures, ride height and suspension stiffness a balancing act in 2013 as the teams try to extract performance from the tyre whilst being mindful of the effects on aero.

If we were to assume that the teams ran X suspension stiffness for 2012 with Y ride height coupled with Z tyre pressure in order to balance the larger contact patch available they must re-proportion X,Y & Z in order to manage the tyres characteristics in 2013.

Below I have quickly sketched a comparison showing the difference between the 2013 and 2012 tyres:

As we can see with the new construction, as force is applied to the tyre a much larger area of the tyre is subjected to the track, whereas with the more rigid sidewall of the 2012 construction it was the shoulders of the tyre that would wear. This is what Pirelli mean when it refers to the tyre increasing thermal degradation, as by virtue of the larger contact patch the tyre will create more heat thus wearing the tyre more quickly.

So as teams spent most of 2012 looking to generate more heat to get the tyres into their performance window, it seems this year will be about who can best manage the heat generated.

This is where I find the comments made by Red Bull interesting, with the team alluding to the fact that with more downforce the tyres are much more difficult to work with. This simply translates to more force placed on the tyres (downforce) = the more heat is being generated at the contact patch increasing thermal degradation. So this is where tyre pressure comes into play; we all know the more heat generated within the tyre, the more this increases the tyre pressures which will once again raise degradation levels. So if we assume X,Y & Z have not been altered from 2012 the degradation will be much higher, by altering X or Z to a less stiff or lower pressure respectively it is therefore viable to increase tyre life by virtue of the downforce loss as the aero platform is less consistent.