Formula One drivers have been asked not to criticise Pirelli in public following Sebastian Vettel's outburst at the Belgian Grand Prix.
After suffering a tyre failure at Spa-Francorchamps, Vettel labelled the situation "unacceptable" in a tirade to TV cameras, while Nico Rosberg also raised his concerns after a similar failure earlier in the weekend. At the Italian Grand Prix, Vettel and Rosberg were among drivers and team bosses summoned to a meeting with Pirelli by Bernie Ecclestone in order to clear the air with the tyre maker.
When asked whether drivers had been told not to criticise the tyres in the future, Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery said: "They have been asked to do it in the right environment, which is in the team and with us."
He added: "Other things happen in the sport and they don't offer an opinion. I think it just needs to be balanced.
"You are not going to attract sponsors and people into the sport when every five minutes there is so much negativity. There's not a queue of 100 tyre companies queuing up to come into Formula One.
"We [Pirelli] might say that's enough and the other company might look at it and say, 'that doesn't look very good over there, does it?' and you are left with a sport with no tyres, if you look at the big picture."
However, Hembery said the main focus of the meeting was about opening up more lines of communication between the drivers and Pirelli.
"It was something we asked for back in June and it is really to find a way going forward if we are to stay in F1 to have a much better working relationship and collaboration between all parties in the sport. We can't go through to 2017 without a dramatic change in tyre widths, for example, with the current regulations saying we can't test in any F1 car whatsoever.
"We also feel there needs to be better communication with the drivers. All parties need to agree on the objective and though you may not agree with the objective, but if the sport decides it is going in a direction then we all need to know we are looking at the same future.
"We are perhaps guilty of not communicating enough with the drivers ourselves, but I think there is a willingness from the drivers to work with us. We make tyres for the top performance cars of the world and they are all rich young men, they probably have lots of cars with Pirelli tyres on. There are certain constraints in the sport go against what we are being asked to do and testing is the most obvious one, but the other one is more reliable data of what is happening, it is a moving target, so there is always a paranoia in F1 of giving people information.
"If somebody finds a performance advantage, they tend to want to keep it, whereas in some cases that might have an influence on what we do. We have 10 different cars and we always have to be looking at the worst case scenario or the most extreme scenario and if we don't know that most extreme scenario, it makes our job very hard. That is what we were trying to convey."