Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsPirelli

Spain first race for hard Pirelli tyres

Pirelli has announced the three tyre compounds available for the Spanish Grand Prix, with the hard tyre making its first appearance of the season.

The first four races - in Australia, Bahrain, China and Russia - will all see the supersoft, soft and medium compounds available to the teams, who have more freedom to pick allocation this season. The race at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in early May will see the soft, medium and hard allocated.

Pirelli picks three sets of tyres as mandatory for each driver to have, with the race in Spain seeing one set of mediums and one set of hards selected as race tyres. Teams only have to run one of those compounds in the race, while a set of soft tyres is also mandatory for use in Q3.

Teams are free to choose their own allocations for the remaining ten sets of tyres each driver will have available throughout the race weekend.

The new ultrasoft tyre compound is set to make its race debut at the following round in Monaco, though those compound nominations have yet to be made public. Teams have to finalise their tyre selections 14 weeks in advance of long-haul races, and eight weeks in advance of European rounds.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.