There has been a lot of talk surrounding the extreme degradation of the tyres manufactured by Pirelli for the 2013 season, but the company’s executives have played down such rumours by saying that the company has not done anything dramatic.

Pirelli did admit that they have made changes to the tyre compounds in the hope of making the spectacle more interesting. The pre-season testing that has been going on for the last few days has resulted in several drivers complaining about extreme degradation of the tyres. The ‘supersoft’ tyre have been taking most of the blame over the last few days.

The Williams driver Pastor Maldonado said recently that not only are the new tyres extremely unpredictable, but they also degraded faster. In addition to this, he has also not been able to achieve faster lap times with the new tyres in place. The McLaren driver Sergio Perez, however, has played down the degradation issue by saying that people are concerned about the same issue last season, but they did not face a lot of problems in the warmer weather of Melbourne. The first race of the season will be the usual Australian Grand Prix this time around as well, and it will be taking place in the month of March.

“Perez is more scared than he should be. All we’ve done is try to slightly increase the spectacle of the racing, but we haven’t done anything dramatic,” said the Pirelli racing manager Mario Isola in an interview given to the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “We were also very worried about the tyres last year. Then in Melbourne in warmer weather everything was much more normal,” said the McLaren driver Sergio Perez. “We are optimistic that in Melbourne, on a much warmer track, the cars will slide less and we will not have the dramatic graining,” said Mark Webber.