Strongly criticising Pirelli too soon: "A foolish way to do things"

Criticism of Pirelli

Since Pirelli returned to Formula 1 in 2011, they have come under pressure numerous times. In Silverstone, there were already several races where we saw Pirelli blow-out tyres, but there is also hardly any overtaking possible with the fast wearing tyres. After the race in Baku, Pirelli took a lot of blame from stakeholders in F1, but according to Priestley, this was way too early.

"Overwhelmingly people have immediately jumped on the Pirelli hating bandwagon and disappointingly some of the commentators did it very quickly, some of the other drivers did it. Having been in a situation of having cars fail and incidents happen when actually very few people know the facts, to come out and publicly crucify a company, or a supplier without knowing the full story is often a foolish way to do things," said Priestley in His latest video.

Waiting for FIAinvestigation

The former McLaren mechanic does want to stress that he's not necessarily saying it wasn't because of Pirelli. "I'm certainly not saying this is not just an outright Pirelli failure because there's lots of evidence pointing towards that, but there's also a possibility that debris could've caused these things. We can't discount that. Lance Stroll, the first major incident, we didn't see any debris or an incident that could have caused that. That doesn't mean there wasn't anything on the circuit. It's a street circuit where a couple of days ago heavy traffic was moving down the roads and people were walking down them," he added. 

According to Priestley, one should wait for the investigation and not make a judgement right away. "We just don't know. It's pointless of any of us saying 'I know what happened, it's obvious there are a couple of scenarios that both have justification on this. Pirelli are doing an investigation, and I believe the FIA will do their own independent investigation. Let's wait and see what happens," Priestly concluded.