Pirelli has officially revealed the details on how it will differentiate between tyre compounds during the F1 tests with only three colours in use in 2019.
Following the confusion with multiple names and colours for the tyre compounds in the 2018 F1 season, Pirelli came up with a solution to use only three colours from 2019 onward – which will be divided into five compounds.
The tyres will be marked as white, yellow and red respectively which will denote hard, medium and soft compounds during the F1 race weekends. The wet and intermediate compounds will continue to be denoted by blue and green respectively.
Even though they have three colours for the slick tyres, they have homologated five dry weather tyres for the 2019 F1 season. Without naming them, they will simply denote it as C1, C2, C3, C4 and C5, where C1 is the hardest in descending order.
For a neutral viewer, they will only see three different colours during race weekends as the white will be used for the hardest compound with yellow being the middle compound and the red denoting the softest – all for that particular weekend.
At the same time, for ‘a hardcore or a nerd’ viewer, Pirelli will release the details of the specific compound used during the race weekend – whether C1, C2 and C3 or C2, C3 and C4 or so on – as they have already for the first four races of the 2019 F1 season.
While the differentiation is set for the grand prix weekends, the pre-season tests and also the in-season tests will have all the five compounds used together and with only three colours in place, Pirelli has come up with a solution to differ the compounds.
As per it, the hardest (C1) and softest (C5) compounds will still be denoted by white and red colour respectively, but it will not carry the stripes which will be seen on C2, C3 and C4 compounds – where C2 will be white, C3 in yellow and C4 in red.
“Normally we will only see three colours at every race, so we’re only using three colours at the tests as well,” said Pirelli’s Motorsport Head, Mario Isola. “But we want to make sure that people can tell the compounds apart.
“As a result, the very hardest and softest tyres won’t be marked with stripes: only the colours will vary. This will be the case for the in-season tests as well.” For starters, it could be a bit confusing but once understood, it will become easy pick.
[Read: Isola on 2019 F1 pit stops and preparations for 18-inch tyres]
[Read: Details of 2019 launches plus pre-season and in-season venues]
