Pirelli has added a gold stripe to the side of the soft tires used at this weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix to try and help make it easier for fans to see which compounds drivers are using.
The Italian tire manufacturer has elected to mark each of the four compounds it is using in 2011 with different colored lettering on the sidewalls. However, following complaints in Australia that it was difficult to pick out the silver and yellow colors used for the hard and soft tires, tweaks have been made for this weekend as an interim solution.
Pirelli's director of motorsport Paul Hembery said that a more permanent change to the tires will be made from the start of the European season.
"We have had obviously a number of comments that people could not recognise the tires, and the stripe is not an ideal solution," he explained. "For Turkey, we will have a much stronger branding on the sidewall. We won't have the stripe; we will connect up the Pirelli and P-Zero wording with more bands of color. It will mean that as it rotates, the black won't dominate. It will look like a turning circle of yellow, and be predominantly yellow in color.
"We will do the same branding for all of the different compounds. From the testing we have done so far, it seems to work very well."