Mark Webber has backed his former teammate Sebastian Vettel's expletive-filled rant about the quality of the tires supplied in F1 by Pirelli.
The pair rarely saw eye-to-eye when fighting for titles at Red Bull, but when it comes to Vettel's blowout at Spa-Francorchamps, Webber said: "Seb is 100 percent right.
"A blowout must not be the penalty for using a tire for too long," the outspoken Australian, now racing a Porsche at Le Mans, told Auto Motor und Sport.
"You should be slow, fair enough, but as a driver you need to be confident that the tire is going to hold together."
Webber thinks the ball is now in the governing body's court to ensure the safety of the drivers.
"Definitely," he said. "Safety is the number one thing for the FIA - you have the cockpit extraction tests, HANS, the crash tests. So you can't turn a blind eye to something as fundamental as the tires."
Webber also refused to back Pirelli's argument that Ferrari went too far in opting for a one-stop in Belgium.
"Imagine if Seb had done the remaining kilometers and finished third. Then Pirelli would have been saying 'Look how great our tires are'," he argued.
"If it's true that Pirelli set a limit of 40 laps for a set, then they can't burst after 28 laps. That's a difference of 12 laps.
"Pirelli has been really lucky so far," said Webber.
The Swiss newspaper Blick reports that, in the wake of Vettel's outburst and also Nico Rosberg's blowout in Belgium, Pirelli will meet with all team bosses ahead of the Italian Grand Prix.
Meanwhile, Michelin has also weighed into the Pirelli blowout saga, insisting it is committed to producing longer-life tires in Formula One.
The two tire companies are currently in competing talks with Bernie Ecclestone about which of them will be awarded the contract as F1's sole supplier beyond 2016.
Some believe Michelin's bid got a boost in the wake of the Belgian Grand Prix, where Nico Rosberg suffered a high-speed blowout, and Sebastian Vettel issued a foul-mouthed rant following a similar incident late in the race.
"I want to know what happened at Spa," said Michelin's sports chief Pascal Couasnon, "but I can't comment because we don't have the data.
"All I can say is that we learn a lot from it," he told Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
"One thing I can tell you is it makes no sense to us to produce tires that last 10 laps. A formula one tire should manage at least one third of the race, and perhaps two-thirds.
"We have to discuss this together with the engineers and Bernie Ecclestone," Couasnon added.
"We need to give the drivers a tire with which they can extract 100 percent from the car, not just 70."
Michelin is pushing hard also to combine longer-life tires with faster compounds and 18-inch wheels, with Couasnon admitting: "We know that the compromise pleasing everybody is a fine line.
"Our challenge is to work this out together with the engineers of the cars."
Couasnon reportedly expects the FIA to make its decision about F1's 2017 supplier in the next four or five weeks.
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