Scarborough suggests Verstappen and Stroll's blowout isn't Pirelli's fault

Max Verstappen and Lance Stroll both crashed out of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix due to a blowout. Pirelli received a lot of criticism for that, but according to tech expert Craig Scarborough, it's not based on anything.

Criticism of Pirelli

Stroll flew into the wall at high speed during the Baku GP. His left rear tyre burst, causing a huge crash. The same thing happened to Verstappen. Many fingers were pointed in the direction of Pirelli afterwards, but in a video by Peter Windsor, Scarborough explains why it is not necessarily a fault in the tyre.

"Listening to the breath of comment on social media. A lot of people are negative about Pirelli. Very few people coming up with sound reasons why it would be anything but a cut in a tyre. I am very much of that latter opinion, I don't think it was a failure of the tyre per se. Though we've seen time and time again, cuts on this current generation of tyres does lead to a complete failure of the tyre," he said. 

Sharp kerbs in Baku?

"They found similar cuts on Hamilton's rear tyre. But with Hamilton, it was only in the tread surface, it hadn't gone down to the construction with allowed the tyre to remain intact," says Scarborough. The Tech expert finds the answer that it would be due to debris too easy. Pirelli and the FIA would do well to take a lap around the circuit, he says.

"The easy answer is to say debris. Looking at the time span between the failures, I don't think we're talking about a single piece of carbon that was floating around on the track. It's probably more likely to be something more structural around the circuit such as the inside edge of a kerb. Drain cover as we saw a couple of weeks ago, even one of the F1 cameras embedded in the kerbs caused tyre cuts. The Pirelli, FIA and team engineers need to walk around the track and find where the drivers took where no one else has gone to cause the cuts," Scarborough concluded.