I read in a few places that Merc were complaining of front tyre blistering during long runs.
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Forget about last season’s names, there is no direct link between them and this year’s tyres. The 2019 compounds are apparently harder than last year anyway.
As I understand it, Pirelli will pick three compounds for every race from the C1 to C5 range. They will then colour the hardest one white, the middle one yellow, and the softest one red. So you have hard, medium, and soft at every race, but the actual compounds will differ. A C4 tyre for instance could be yellow at one race and red at another, depending on whether it is the middle or softest compound selected for the race.
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Yeah I guess I should just forget about it. Makes sense.
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The way I’ve been thinking about it is essentially to break the 5 compounds into 3 race tyre “ranges” - Hard Range is C1, C2 and C3; Medium Range is C2, C3 and C4; Soft Range is C3, C4 and C5. (And I’ve been assuming that Pirelli won’t skip a compound for a race weekend?). Within each range made available for a race weekend there’s always going to be a Hard (white), a Medium (yellow), and a Soft (red) tyre for the teams to use regardless of which range they use.
So the tyres for Australia (in my mind) are the Medium Range compounds.
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They skipped tyres last year at some races, but then they had more compounds available. With only five, it makes sense that they would likely choose three consecutive compounds for every race. I will bet you right now for instance that Monaco will be C3, C4, and C5.
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Other things we might deduce from this compound range is that the C3 tyre will be used at every single race this year, and that the C1 is not likely to be used often, especially given that the compounds are harder than last year.
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For reference, this was last year’s tire selection for Australia. While this year’s tires do not 100% translate to the same softness, for easy think about it like this:
C5 - hypersoft
C4 - ultrasoft
C3 - supersoft
C2 - soft
C1 - mediums
Or at least some vague translation from last year to now.
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Where do hard and superhard fit in then…? My suspicion is that if you had to map one to the other, it might look something like this:
| 2018 | 2019 |
|---|---|
| Superhard | - |
| Hard | C1 |
| Medium | C2 |
| Soft | C3 |
| Supersoft | C4 |
| Ultrasoft | C5 |
| Hypersoft | - |
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Perhaps that is more correct. The change also is that here are only 5 tire compounds to choose from this year, with last year having 7. So there will be tire choices that fell away. Like that awful Superhard that nobody ever used or even tried. I would also argue that the hard fell away as well, as again only one race saw any teams think about the hards. Those were also extremely useless tires.
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I would agree, but as I understand from driver feedback (Hamilton in particular) this year’s tyres are harder than last year. It may even translate something like this:
| 2018 | 2019 |
|---|---|
| Superhard | C1 |
| Hard | C2 |
| Medium | C3 |
| Soft | C4 |
| Supersoft | C5 |
| Ultrasoft | - |
| Hypersoft | - |
Absolutely shocking news for Williams. It’s pretty safe to say they have just lost the entire season
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It gives me a very bad feeling, this could be the end of williams especially if both drivers also have no faith in the team/car
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This is sad and shocking, to be honest. I find it very surprising considering Paddy’s track record at McLaren and Mercedes. He’s worked on race-winning and championship-winning cars all his career.
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I agree that it’s really not a good sign at all for Williams. It’ll be a sad day, but not entirely surprising, to see a press release in the mid-season break saying “Williams F1 Team withdraws from racing”.
To be fair “taking a leave of absence for personal reasons” could be nothing more than that. But it is ominously coincidental. Your CTO doesn’t take personal time a week before the start of a new F1 season. And especially not a week after the car you’re responsible for the underperforms so badly in pre-season testing.
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WTF is wrong with French people
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They can’t build reliably fast engines? I would say that is what’s wrong with them
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I want to get home to watch the Netflix
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The tyre debate continues. If the C1 tyres are the old hards, absolutely no one will want to use them
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Yip, all 10 episodes of Season 1 of Formula 1: Drive to Survive are available to Netflix subscribers now.
https://www.netflix.com/watch/80239920
Mesa binge watching tomorrow.
In case you didn’t hear though, be aware that the behind the scenes, fly on the wall involvement of both Mercedes and Ferrari is non-existent. Both teams rejected the producer’s (and Liberty Media’s who co-produced the series) request to all the team to give the production crew open access to their teams.
‘A slight disservice’
“Mercedes and Ferrari wanted to operate under different terms to the rest of the teams, and we didn’t feel comfortable with that,” executive producer Paul Martin is quoted by the Telegraph newspaper.
“My view is that they did a slight disservice to the fans and the sport by not taking part.”Mercedes defended its decision to not take part.
“Competing for the world championship is an all-consuming business that demands every ounce of focus from the entire team. We are driven first and foremost by performance in every decision we make,” said a spokesman.
Ferrari declined to comment.
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