As Motorsport.com reports, the questions surrounding how Formula 1 machinery would handle a wet race have hung over the sport all year. That anxiety reached a fever pitch ahead of the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos, where rain for both qualifying and the race was practically guaranteed. While the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia earlier in the season saw an interruption from rain and a software glitch, the track dried quickly there. Brazil offered no such reprieve, giving everyone their first true look at how this generation of cars performs when the heavens open.
Qualifying required an 80-minute red flag after a sudden downpour hit right at the start of the session. Naturally, it generated some spicy soundbites, including a fiery quote from George Russell. He warned that if it had been a race, continuing would have risked a horrific incident because driving conditions were simply non-existent. But once the panic subsided, the paddock consensus was far more measured. The FIA received widespread praise for making the right call to suspend Q1 instantly and waiting for a safe window to resume. Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur noted that during their initial lap before the red flag, they returned with two centimetres of water inside the car.
Those torrential moments proved too soaked for anything meaningful, but the deeper worry centered on how the tyres and cars would manage intermediate and changing weather. Historically, Pirelli's heavily treaded extreme wets barely see the light of day because their operating window is so narrow; their tread blocks overheat the moment a racing line starts drying out. That leaves the intermediate tyre as the go-to, but this year's versions proved too hard and slow to fire up, starved of proper like-for-like development testing due to narrow wheel mandates. Combined with the brutal torque of modern engines, fears ran rampant that these cars would be dangerously undriveable in the wet.
Reality, thankfully, proved far more nuanced. Behind the scenes, the FIA has spent the year working hard to manage power delivery in these conditions. While qualifying showed the extreme wets might actually be more usable now, the intermediates brought fresh headaches. Kimi Antonelli spun off at Juncao on his grid-to-pit lap, and several drivers found their cars becoming a handful again when late-race rain forced a switch back to inters. Vasseur praised the increased viability of the big wet tyre, pointing out it stops teams from taking unnecessary risks on inters during heavier downpours. Even so, the grip levels remained a massive talking point, with Vasseur admitting that everyone on the grid-to-grid lap looked completely wild.
Pirelli now faces the engineering challenge of bringing the wet and intermediate performance profiles closer together for next year. Alex Albon, who finished 15th in Brazil, pointed out that the inters struggled to ever reach operating temperature before wearing out completely. That particular tyre quirk explains some early-race oddities, where front-runners had to crawl with zero grip while backmarkers caught strong starts. Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton both surged into the top 10 from 20th and 21st on the grid, though Hamilton later slipped backward as his car suffered massive oversteer snaps, and Verstappen struggled once slicks returned.
Carlos Sainz weighed in on the compound limitations, stating that the inter remains a very weak tyre at the rear in mixed conditions because the front gives up just as the rear finally warms up. Meanwhile, Liam Lawson highlighted how much ambient temperature dictates the chaos, noting that cooler air made the cars nearly undriveable on the grid. Lawson warned that tracks like Vegas would spell trouble if rain hit, though he acknowledged the silver lining: the sport successfully pushed through a full weekend with these wet-weather tyres for the first time.
F1
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