Regulation tweaks for safety car and pit rules

A decision over the Bahrain Grand Prix was not the only issue on the agenda at Tuesday's FIA World Motor Sport Council meeting.

Other matters were discussed and some decisions were actually made!

Nothing too earth shattering, just a few tweaks to the regulations.

The first being that due to there being no testing during the season, new tyre manufacturer Pirelli has requested that during Friday morning practice, teams can run 'experimental' tyres.

This idea has been introduced so that the Italian tyre-maker can continue to develop the tyres, throughout the 2011 season.

A statement from the FIA read: 'At certain events, one additional specification of dry weather tyre may be made available to all teams for evaluation purposes.

'Teams will be informed about such an additional specification at least one week before the start of the relevant event. Two sets of these tyres will be allocated to each driver for use during P1 and P2, and any such tyres must be returned to the tyre supplier before the start of P3.

The news was unsurprisingly welcomed by Pirelli.

'We needed to put in place a mechanism within the regulations now to allow us to test new tyres in a competitive context this year if necessary, and it's great that we have this possibility open to us because we are already hard at work defining the specification of our tyres for the future.' Pirelli's motorsport boss Paul Hembery said to Autosport Magazine.

The next tweak comes to the regulations regarding safety car periods.

To prevent drivers running at unsafe speeds during a safety car period in order to catch up with the pack behind the safety car, a safety car speed limit was introduced, forcing drivers to decrease their overall lap time by around 40%.

For 2011, that rule has now been extended to the first two laps under a yellow flag.

There has also been tweaks to the use of the pit lane during safety car periods. The pit lane will only be open to drivers wishing to change tyres, while there will also no longer be a red light at the exit of the pit lane during safety car periods.

This previously meant that any driver wanting to exit the pit lane would have to wait, while the safety car and the following train of F1 cars were driving down the start-finish line had passed.

Always felt this was a daft rule so glad to see it has been scrapped.