Pirelli has revealed the simplified colour coding for its tyres for the 2019 F1 season.

Next year, there will be just three colours at each race. These will always be the same - white, yellow and red - denoting the hard, medium and soft tyre choices respectively at every grand prix.

However, that doesn't mean that there will be only three compounds.

Instead, the hard, medium and soft compounds will continue to vary to suit the different characteristics of each track. For instance, a red soft for Monaco will differ substantially from a red soft for Silverstone or Suzuka.

The precise number of compounds available, covering a wide spectrum from soft to hard, will be communicated in December after homologation from the FIA.

Before every race next year, Pirelli will reveal which exact compounds form the hard, medium and soft choices for the weekend.

The new system is intended to make it easy for the casual fan to tell the difference between the tyres, yet still allow people who want more detail to know which of the specific compounds available are being used.

The colours for the intermediate and full wet tyres remain unchanged - green and blue respectively.

"We've been talking about this with the teams, FIA and Formula 1 for a while," said Mario Isola, Pirelli's head of car racing. "The idea behind the change is to make all the tyres more easily recognizable and explainable - especially for television - while still clearly denoting which specific compounds are being used at each race."

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by YuppieScum, 20/10/2018 16:17

"So the quest for the "casual fan" is the reason to dumb down the sport? I can only see this making things *more* confusing:

Casual Fan: So <driver> has switched to the medium tyre?
Hard-Core Fan: Yes, except that it's the soft compound.
CF: Er, so what's the soft tyre, then?
HCF: Well, this weekend it's the super-soft.
CF: What do you mean "this weekend"?
HCF: Well, this weekend the hard tyre is the medium compound, the medium tyre is the soft, and the soft is the ultra-soft.
CF: ...and?
HCF: At the next race, the hard tyre will be the soft, the medium will be the super-soft, and the soft will be the hyper-soft.
CF: WTF? Why it is all so complicated? Why can't they just call a medium tyre a medium, an so on?
HCF: Well, the people who purchased F1 are Americans, and used a focus group of American motorsport fans - who are used to racing cars only turning in one direction - to decide how to make F1 easier to understand for people like you.

Also, I wonder when we can expect FIFA to change the offside rule to appeal the the "casual fan"?
"

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2. Posted by GrahamG, 20/10/2018 14:56

"And the big news is.... the colour of the sidewalls of the tyres
Not tyres which allow drivers to race, not tyres which work at more than +/- 1 degree for 10 mins on a Thursday afternoon, no, by far the most important is the colour of the sidewalls

Pathetic is no an adequate word"

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Pirelli reveals 2019 tyre range colours

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