As F1's sole tyre supplier, Pirelli wins every race. But the Italian tyre manufacturer has had a tough run on the PR front, getting the blame for every failure despite delivering high-deg tyres to brief in an era in which they have no real opportunities to test, perfect, or refine.
While Pirelli is hardly the first tyre supplier in motorsport history to suffer blow-outs, delaminations, and accusations of poor construction, the years since the Italian manufacturer's 2011 entry into F1 have seen all manner of headlines relating to tyre use and misuse.
We had the 'terror tyres' of 2013, which were changed after that year's British Grand Prix. In the wake of that scandal, Pirelli conceded that it should not have allowed teams to invert (or swap) their tyres, running rubber on the opposite side of the car to that which it had been intended. More recently, we had the twin Spa blowouts suffered by Nico Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel.
And then, in Monza, Lewis Hamilton faced the prospect of losing his Italian Grand Prix victory when it emerged at the end of the race that the Mercedes driver had left the grid with a left rear tyre running a minimum starting pressure 0.3PSI below Pirelli's stated recommendation.
Hamilton was allowed to keep his win when all was said and done, because his tyre pressure on leaving the pits was within the defined parameters, but it made for a very confusing few hours post-race.
According to Mercedes' Paddy Lowe, the team's starting pressures were set under the watchful eye of the team's embedded Pirelli technician. "We don't understand it, to be honest," Lowe said before the FIA's verdict was announced.
"All I know is we set our pressures fully supervised by the Pirelli engineer, he was perfectly happy with them, as they were set. We'll go and investigate. I'd call it an abundance of caution, because we haven't done anything wrong. We thought 'let's make a gap'. We've been summoned to the stewards so we'll go there and explain it."
Traditionally, a tyre technician will assume responsibility for monitoring tyre temperatures and pressures throughout the race weekend, collecting and analysing data throughout every practice session, in qualifying, and in the race itself. Worn tyres are checked for blistering and degradation, and the data collected is then used to guide stint lengths and pit stop strategy.
Curious about the bigger strategic role tyre techs play within a team, on Thursday I asked the drivers at the FIA press conference to explain the relationship - to what extent was the advice of Pirelli's rubber expert heeded or ignored on the pit wall and in the garage?
"Well, sometimes there are strict things that you must follow and other times there are just suggestions on everything," Nico Rosberg explained in reference to his team's tyre use at the Belgian Grand Prix. "I'm not sure... we handled everything accordingly in Spa and made modifications also throughout the weekend to make sure we were running the tyres as safely as possible, according to guidelines given by Pirelli."
Sebastian Vettel's comment appears eerily prescient with 20-20 hindsight.
"I think it's fairly simple," he said. "There's a lot of things that you have to stick to because it's part of the rules. Also the FIA is checking so you can decide not to listen but then obviously you risk to be disqualified, so I don't think there's any team taking that risk.
"And then there's other things that you talk about and use the expertise of the Pirelli engineer inside your garage and I think it would be stupid not to listen to him, for all of us, for all the teams, because obviously they have knowledge that we can't get about their tyres etc, so of course we take it very, very seriously."