Pirelli says its plan to manufacturer a performance cliff into the tyres has not worked this season, but it is planning to stick with the concept for 2017.
Pirelli built two layers of compound into this year's tyres so that drivers would experience a distinct drop off in performance once the tyre reached a certain level of wear. However, after extensive testing in Barcelona, Pirelli admits that the difference between the layers was not significant enough to create the desired effect.
"It's probably that the properties of the material under there isn't bringing a great enough loss of performance," Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery explained. "Of course it is going to be wear profile dependent, but it needs to have different properties to create the effect we were looking for."
Next year Pirelli has been tasked with building more resilient tyres that do not suffer the type of thermal degradation that has featured in its compounds in recent years. Hembery said the layered approach, if it works, will suit Pirelli's 2017 plans.
"The idea was to change the properties of the compound so you lost performance when you got to a certain wear level, which then would create such a performance loss that you change the tyre. That probably has more significance going forward to 2017 when you have lower degradation and a wider thermal range, because you don't want people wearing down to the mechanical structure of the tyre rather than the compound structure. If you lose the physical performance then you will force people to make a tyre change."
Asked if he was confident of more success with the layered compounds next year, Hembery added: "You can have more chance of testing and different philosophies, you need to make it more extreme probably."