"Bono, my tyres are gone!!"

No race goes by where Lewis Hamilton does not complain about his Pirellis to his race engineer, Bono, saying " I can't look after these tyres! They're dead!” or " My tyres are gone, Bono".

Lewis Hamilton has also publicly called out Pirelli various times, asking them to make better tyres.

Recently, the biggest tyre-related controversy occurred at the 2020 British GP, where the tyres of both the Mercedes drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas and the tyres of Mclaren driver, Carlos Sainz, all exploded. While Lewis Hamilton managed to drag his 3 legged horse(car) to victory, both his teammate, Valtteri Bottas, and Mclaren driver, Carlos Sainz, both dropped way down the order and eventually out of the points.

This incident made me want to learn more about F1's sole tyre supplier, Pirelli.

Tyres are the only point of contact between the ground and the F1 car. Thus we can say that the performance of an F1 car is highly dependent on the tyres used.

Pirelli is an Italian tyre manufacturing company based in Milan, Italy. Pirelli's F1 debut took place in the year 1950. In the 1950 Pirelli had a lot of competition from fellow tyre manufacturers: Dunlop, Firestone, Continental and Goodyear.

Since 2010, Pirelli became the sole tire sponsor of F1, from when Bridgestone decided to withdraw. Pirelli also provides tyres for F2 and F3, the junior categories.

Pirelli also started colour coding their tyres, so that fans could recognise the compounds that were being used by the drivers. Here is a table:

F1 tyres and their colours

Tyre Name	Tyre Colour	Tyre pic
Hypersoft tyres	Pink
Ultrasoft tyres	Purple
Soft tyres	Red
Medium tyres	Yellow
Hard tyres	White
Intermidiate tyres	Green
Wet tyres	Blue

Since the start, Pirelli was asked to design tyres that would degrade rapidly. The main reason F1 asked Pirelli to make that kind of tyres was that this would enable closer racing and that it would also promote more pit stops

The years, 2013, 2014 and 2015 were not the best years for the Pirelli tyres. There were many tyre failures, which led to many dangerous incidents. For example:

In 2013 at the British GP, the tyres of 7 F1 drivers failed. They were the tyres of Pérez, Alonso, Hamilton, Gutierrez, Vergne, and Massa. Perez’s tyre blew out not once but twice!!

In 2013, at the Belgium GP, the tyres of 4 time F1 champion, Sebastian Vettel and 2-time world champion, Fernando Alsonso, blew up.

But the most dangerous tyre failure took place in 2014 during pre-season testing. 2016 world champion, Nico Rosberg, was sent into the spin at 200 miles per hour, with no fault of his own. A similar incident also took place in 2nd practice session at Belgium 2015, where Nico was lucky to not get sent into the barrier at high speed following a tyre failure.

Talking about tyres, the types used in dry weather or slick tyres have many different compounds. These compounds are classified based on their hardness into C1, C2, C3, C4 and C5 categories.

C1 is the hardest and C5 is the softest, also the compound used for fastest tyres Pirelli has ever made.

Pirelli chooses 3 compounds for every race. And each driver gets around 13 sets of tyres for the race weekends.

Now that we know what slick tyres are, let's talk about wet tyres.

There are two types of wet tyres, depending on how much water they can clear in one second.

The two different types of wet tyres are: Intermediate tyres and full wet tyres.

Intermediate tyres can clear 30 litres of water per second when the car is travelling at 300 kmph.

Full wet tyres can clear 85 litres of water per second when the car is travelling at 300 kmph.

Even after the tyres stopped exploding as soon as you pushed them to their limit, there were a lot of improvements that had to be made. Hopefully the new 18-inch tyres that are going to be inroduced in 2022 will help bring more wheel to wheel racing.