Pirelli names Germany and Singapore compounds

Pirelli has announced its tyre compound choices for the German and Singapore grands prix later this year.

The German Grand Prix is the final race ahead of the mid-season break, with the grand prix at Hockenheim returning after being absent from the calendar last season. With potentially high temperatures in late July, Pirelli has opted for the medium, soft and supersoft compounds, with one set of medium and one set of softs tyres required to be kept back for the race.

While teams have to choose their tyre compounds for European races eight weeks in advance of the race, that deadline is 14 weeks for flyaways. As a result the Singapore Grand Prix compounds have also been nominated by Pirelli.

With Singapore a street circuit, the softest compounds in the range have been selected, with the soft, supersoft and ultrasoft set to be used. Pirelli has nominated one set of the soft and one set of the supersoft as the race tyres which must be held back.

Only one set of the two race compounds must be used, while one set of the softest compound is also mandatory for use in Q3. Teams are then free to select the other ten sets of tyres per race.

So far the hard tyre compound has only been used once - at the Spanish Grand Prix - and will appear again at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone at the start of July.

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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.