For racing what's the difference between tire compounds?

Question

in formula one and most other races they use soft medium and hard compound tires. what is the difference between them and what are they best at?

Answer 1

Soft tires, heat up quicker, grip harder, wear faster.

They also tend to overheat easier and slide around more when they do.

Imagine you have a bar of chocolate you just took out the fridge.

You put it on the table and give it a push with your finger so it slides.

Let it heat up a little bit so it gets softer.

Repeat the exercise, this time the chocolate will not move as much as it's stickier, it will also leave marks on the table.

So it grips the table harder but it wears faster.

Now let it heat up a little further but not quite melt.

Push it with your finger, rather than grip hard like it did earlier it will slide on the table leaving thick marks of chocolate on the surface.

A soft tire that overheats in hot conditions or as a result of too aggressive a driving style will slide on a film of melting rubber producing much slower laptimes.

So a softer tire is much quicker that a hard one for lap time because it gives a lot more grip, but every tire has a range of temperatures it will work, if they are too low it never reaches operating temperature and slides around a lot, if it gets too hot it wears very quickly and, again, slides.

A soft tire is more likely to overheat when it's hot but is much much faster when it's cold or the track very slippery when grip makes a big difference.

Brand new tires have a couple of laps in them when they're very quick.

The first two laps of any race tire are when you want to really put in a perfect lap in qualifying.

After that there is a drop off in performance where the tire provides consistent grip for many laps, how many depends on how soft it is.

Then, as it nears the end of it's life the performance starts to drop off progressively until all the rubber is gone.

Answer 2

well explained guys

Answer 3

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Soft compounds are generally "stickier" but can overheat and/or wear out quicker. So, quicker laps but less of them.

Hard compounds don't generally afford as much grip as soft compounds but are less prone to overheating and/or wear and tear. So, slower laps but more of them.

This is over-simplified and teams normally end up with a headache as to how many laps to do on each set of tyres, etc

...and no, Spell Checker, this is the correct spelling of tyres in the UK, so it doesn't "look like I have 2 misspellings" to me.

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