20/10/2018
NEWS STORY
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."