Rubber Wars: From Soft to Hard

Woohoo Max won…for the 6th time in a row 🙂

_{Graphic of Silverstone Circuit by Aniket Pal}

However, Silverstone stayed true to its iconic history with a beautiful run from McLaren (bias).

Each team brought an exciting strategy, including Hamilton’s (Mercedes-AMG Petronas) counting on a safety car allowing him to secure a place on the podium alongside his fellow Brit Norris. Now, Norris’ strategy created a lot of grief for him. Though he had an amazing start and lead on Verstappen, he eventually lost it and had to drive to defend against Hamilton’s attacks. These attacks were especially threatening because Max and Hamilton had switched to soft tires after the safety, while Norris stuck with hard tires. Thus, the initially cool soft tires gave them a traction advantage over Norris trying to warm up his C1 tires. However, Norris has been putting points up recently and finessed his way into a second-place finish, leaving two British placements at the British GP.

From Soft to Hard…

I know this is a deviation from pure aerodynamics, but I wanted to take this GP to investigate how tires affect performance.

Soft Tires:

Soft tires are most effective at first when cool. They tend to heat up fairly quickly due to this increased friction though. So, drivers must make a conscious effort to manage the heat.
This tire is typically seen as the fastest tire–the best compound for qualifying. However, it wears out quickly, so its performance wanes in longer races.

Hard Tires:

The traditional hard tire is 1 second per lap slower on average. However, it can save teams valuable time by decreasing the need for pit stops.
Teams often test and use medium tires to optimize speed and endurance.

Longest Soft	Longest Medium	Longest Hard
28 Laps	33 Laps	32 Laps

Longest tire stints for the 2023 F1 British GP. Types of tires include: White Hard (C1), Yellow Medium (C2), Red Soft (C3), Green Intermediate, and Blue Wet. The fastest lap times occurred ~ 10 laps into the tires’ use.

We can see that the mediums have been significantly optimized favoring durability. However, we can observe a trend that most drivers (Verstappen, Hamilton, Perez, Saint, and more) started medium and switched to soft to close it out. So, Piastri and Norris’ strategy to go hard at the end was intriguing to watch as he was able to think less about overheat and more about keeping Hamilton at bay.

Fearlessly Forward.

Overall, this was a beautiful GP to observe the effects of tires on driving styles and times. Plus, the fans looked really happy out at Silverstone. Fearlessly Forward McLaren.

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