George Russell, Williams, Circuit de Catalunya, 2019

Pirelli announces tyre selections for Spanish and Canadian GPs

2019 F1 season

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Pirelli will bring its softest tyre selection available for the Canadian Grand Prix at Montreal.

Formula 1’s official tyre supplier has nominated the C5 tyre, its softest compound, for the seventh round of the championship in Montreal. The C5 tyre is based on the hyper-soft compound from 2018.

However the C5 is also likely to appear in its selection for the Monaco Grand Prix, which has not been announced yet. The Canadian Grand Prix tyre selection has to be made earlier as it is a non-European round.

Pirelli also confirmed it will bring its hardest available tyre selection for the Spanish Grand Prix at the Circuit de Catalunya, where pre-season testing took place.

The tyres will be referred to as ‘hard’, ‘medium’ and ‘soft’ at all races. Therefore the C3 compound, which will be the red-coloured ‘soft’ tyre in Spain, will be the white-marked ‘hard’ tyre for the Monaco Grand Prix weekend.

2019 tyre selections confirmed so far

2019 tyres2018 tyres
MelbourneC2C3C4SoftSuper-softUltra-soft
BahrainC1C2C3MediumSoftSuper-soft
ShanghaiC2C3C4MediumSoftUltra-soft
BakuC2C3C4SoftSuper-softUltra-soft
CatalunyaC1C2C3MediumSoftSuper-soft
Monte-CarloTBCTBCTBCSuper-softUltra-softHyper-soft
MontrealC3C4C5Super-softUltra-softHyper-soft

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2019 F1 season

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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13 comments on “Pirelli announces tyre selections for Spanish and Canadian GPs”

  1. Hopefully they’ll skip a compound sometimes this year. It caused interesting races like China last year..

  2. Honestly, this whole tire naming thing is just absurd.

    “The tyres will be referred to as ‘hard’, ‘medium’ and ‘soft’ at all races. Therefore the C3 compound, which will be the red-coloured ‘soft’ tyre in Spain, will be the white-marked ‘hard’ tyre for the Monaco Grand Prix weekend.”

    The “C” designations should have stayed internal to Pirelli and we should just go back to the “prime and option” labels. Much simpler and easier to follow.

    1. The point is the hardcore crowd will talk about compounds c1-c5. But the mass audience only has to think about soft-medium-hard, with the colours for each compound staying the same for every race. It’s much easier to explain to the casual viewer that way. They will never know (or care) about the actual c1-c5 compounds.

    2. I think the naming convention of soft-medium-hard is as good as it gets in this 3 options. The C nominations (which for most people are totally irrelevant) still provide extra bit of information to those who want it before the race weekends. And the soft-medium-hard naming is literally perfect for race weekends compared to the farce that was the 9 different nonsensical compound names.

      1. @socksolid
        Agreed. I also like the Indycar system (Reds and Blacks) as it’s even more simple. But Soft-Medium-Hard is very simple to follow.

  3. The C1, C2 etc. system is so much easier to understand than trying to remember which ‘soft’ compound was where on the hardness scale.

  4. Alex McFarlane
    7th March 2019, 12:49

    Can’t they just have 5 different colours for each compound and leave them that way for all the races?

    I guess that’s too simple.

  5. The new naming system is even more confusing! What in the blazes is C1? C2? huh? Even if you tell me which one is the softer I will forget it in the next 10 seconds. Madness.

    1. Alex McFarlane
      7th March 2019, 18:07

      So Pirelli make 5 compounds, with C1 the hardest and C5 the softest, that’s the easy part – numbers go from hard to soft.

      Teams can bring 3 of those 5 compounds to a race weekend, with each tyre marked according to whether they are softest (red) medium (yellow) or hardest (white).

      Where it gets confusing, is that the “medium” yellow marked tyre from race to race could be a C2, C3 or C4, depending on the softest and hardest sets selected by Pirelli for a race weekend.

      It’s all a bit silly really, and could be solved by referring to the actual compound numbers only.

      1. @alex:
        Correct me if i am wrong but i dont think the color bands will change for each race. Only the nomenclature–> hard, medium and soft.

        1. Alex McFarlane
          8th March 2019, 12:46

          That’s correct yes.

  6. Why not a, b, c compounds, no tyre markings so we have no idea what cars are running and just focus on the race. So many aspects to F1 surely not many care about coloured tyres and what they are.

  7. robinsonf1 (@)
    8th March 2019, 11:49

    Makes it simpler for the casual viewer but makes it more complicated for the dedicated viewer. Was it really the best solution? I blame a lot of these minor changes on broadcasters not bothering with properly explaining things to the audience.

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