The mule car testing program continues this week in Barcelona. Red Bull and Alfa Romeo are participating in the program, and Alpine is running for the second time after an earlier meeting this year in Bahrain.
Further dry tests are planned with AlphaTauri in Austria, followed by Red Bull, Aston Martin and Haas in Silverstone and finally Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari in Hungary.
All teams will then drive the final tires after the season finale in Abu Dhabi.
The tests focus on designs that are always determined first to work with connections.
“In terms of development, we are in the process of completing the construction and profile,” said Isola.
“I would say we’re 80-90% done, and now we’re starting a test campaign for new connections.
“We have a new compound that we’re already using, a C3 level that works quite well. It’s the first of the new family of compounds that we plan to introduce for next year, with the properties that are required and in which the destination letter was agreed with the drivers.
“So much less overheating. Of course we have to confirm that when we have the final version of the cars.”
Isola admitted that the mule wagon tests may not provide all the answers as the final 2022 cars will be very different.
“Right now we are using mule cars, which should be representative enough of the cars for the next year. But we know that the cars for the next year will be very different.
“And the other point that we can’t test during a tire development session is the impact of the wind deflector. We only have one or two cars driving on the track, there is no real traffic.
“And so we can assume that when we design a new tire, a new tire to reduce overheating. And the new aero package should also suffer less if it follows in another car.
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“You should keep the downforce or lose a maximum of 10%, which is a completely different situation than now where you lose up to 50% of the downforce and obviously start to slide. But that’s something we won’t have an answer until next year . “
Robert Kubica, Alfa Romeo Racing C41
Photo by: Pirelli
Regarding the representativeness of the mule cars, he said: “We asked the teams to set a level of downforce, a minimum weight and a weight distribution that was in line with expectations for the next year.
“So all mule cars are good enough to test whether they can recreate what will happen next year.
“But we have some differences, like I talked about overheating, for example, because we are obviously using the brakes that are on the cars now, not the new system, and also without the rim covers that affect the performance and the heating of the car. ” Edge.
“So there are still some question marks for next year. We’re trying to have cars that are as representative as possible of next year’s performance.”
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