Pirelli has elected to shake things up with its Formula 1 tyre selection for the British and Belgian Grands Prix in its efforts to spice up the racing.
Amid a growing trend for teams to eke out one-stop strategies this year, F1’s tyre supplier has been making efforts to try to be more aggressive with its compound selections.
At recent events Pirelli has rolled out its softest C6 compound, but going that extreme is not feasible for a majority of circuits on the calendar because they put too much force through the tyres.
For July’s British and Belgian Grands Prix – taking place at the high-speed and challenging Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps tracks – Pirelli is trying out two different approaches in its hopes of making things more unpredictable.
For Silverstone, Pirelli is going to go one step softer than it has before – taking the C2, C3 and C4.
At Spa, Pirelli has elected to introduce a gap in its compound selection in the hope of deterring teams from being too comfortable about going for a one-stop strategy on the hardest option available.
This is the first time in the current ground effect era that it has skipped compounds like this, with the last notable time this happened being back in 2018 when it varied its choices of the softest tyres available.
Alongside the usual C3 and C4 tyres for Spa, Pirelli is taking the C1 rather than the C2.
The idea is that it will make the hardest option a lot slower over the stint, which could encourage teams to run the softer compounds even if it means an extra stop.
As Pirelli’s motorsport director Mario Isola explained recently about the thinking behind skipping compounds in its selection: “If you want to go one stop hard/medium, you are penalised by the fact that hard is much slower. So someone could choose a more aggressive strategy with mediums and soft for the race.”
Pirelli has also announced that it will take the C3, C4 and C5 compounds to the races either side of Silverstone and Spa - the Austrian and Hungarian Grands Prix – with the C6 not thought to be viable option for those tracks.
