Tyres are the single biggest variable in a race. Every team buys the same rubber from Pirelli, so how a driver manages it often matters more than raw car speed. Half of any race broadcast is really a conversation about tyres.
The dry compounds
Pirelli makes a range of dry “slick” tyres, from the hardest to the softest. The range runs from C0/C1 at the hard end to C6 at the soft end, and Pirelli nominates three of them for each weekend. Those three are then labelled simply as hard (white sidewall), medium (yellow) and soft (red), so the colours you see are relative to the weekend, not absolute.
The trade-off is always the same: softer tyres grip harder and go faster but wear out sooner; harder tyres are slower but last longer. Choosing which to run, and when, is the heart of strategy.
Wet-weather tyres
When it rains there are two grooved options. The intermediate (green sidewall) clears a damp or lightly wet track. The full wet (blue sidewall) is for standing water and pumps huge amounts of spray. Drivers switch between these and slicks as conditions change, and getting that crossover lap right can win or lose a race.
The two-compound rule and the cliff
In a dry race, drivers must use at least two different dry compounds, which guarantees at least one stop. As a tyre wears, lap times slowly degrade; push it too far and performance falls off a sudden cliff, a steep, non-linear drop where grip vanishes and lap times balloon. Hearing a driver report they are “off the cliff” usually means a pit stop is imminent. Managing degradation to stay just short of that edge is the skill that separates a clean strategy from a ruined one (see pit stops & strategy).