Expanded F1 tyre compounds for 2023

This year’s F1 tyre compounds will be selected from a pool of six different options, up from five last year.

Pirelli has released details of the rubber it has selected for the opening three rounds of the season and, in doing so, detailed a new ‘Compound 1’ tyre for 2023.

“This new-for-2023 compound slots in between last year’s C1 and C2,” it outlined.

“Based on the latter, it was created to reduce the performance gap between what had previously been the two hardest compounds in the range.”

For each F1 event, Pirelli selects three tyre compounds from its range for teams to use, labelling them Hard, Medium, and Soft.

For Bahrain, that selection has come from the harder end of the range, with the new C1 to debut as the Hard that weekend, with the C2 as Medium and C3 as soft.

Round 2 of the season, the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix, will see tyres one step softer in the range; the white-walled Hard tyre will be the C2. That selection remains for the Australian Grand Prix.

Regulations which surround tyres remain unchanged from 2022 with two a mandate on the use of two compounds during a grand prix.

Allocations are also the same, in most cases.

That means each driver will have 13 sets of dry rubber, four sets of intermediates, and three sets of wets fur use over a race weekend unless a Sprint is employed when that decreases to 12 sets of slicks.

For 2023, a ‘Revised Qualifying Format‘ has been introduced at ‘up to two events’.

In those, tyre selection is mandated through the three-part qualifying process, with C1 used in the opening 18 minutes, C2 in the 15 minutes which follows, and C3 in Qualifying 3.

Under that format, drivers have a maximum of three sets of hard tyres, up to four sets of medium compound tyres, and softs limited to four sets for the weekend.

Ordinarily, drivers have two sets of hards, three mediums, and eight sets of softs at their disposals – or two hard, four medium, and six soft sets on a Sprint weekend.