Tyres and pit stops
Tyre compounds
Everyone has the same tyres, supplied by Pirelli. There are six compounds for dry weather, from the hardest, C1, to the softest, C6, and three are picked for each round. On track you can tell them apart by the colour of the stripe: red for soft, yellow for medium, white for hard.
Soft tyres give a fast lap but wear out quickly; hard tyres are slower but last longer. That’s where all the strategy comes from: which tyres to start on, when to change them and what to change to.
Tyres for the rain
For a wet track there are intermediate tyres with a green stripe, for damp tarmac, and wet tyres with a blue stripe, for a downpour. When the track is drying out or getting wetter, timing the switch right can be worth tens of seconds.
The two-compound rule
In a dry race, every driver must use at least two different compounds, so everyone needs at least one pit stop. If the race turns wet and a driver has used intermediate or wet tyres, the rule no longer applies.
The pit stop
At a pit stop, the car pulls into its team’s box: the mechanics lift it and change all four wheels. The best crews do it in under two seconds; a normal stop takes two to three. But the whole trip down the speed-limited pit lane costs about twenty seconds, so strategists weigh up every stop.
Undercut and overcut
Pit a lap earlier than a rival, and on fresh tyres you can lap faster and come out ahead after they stop — that’s the undercut. The opposite move is the overcut: stay out longer and gain time while your rival is warming up their new tyres.
This chapter’s key term — .