(Motorsport-Total.com) – Tire manufacturer Pirelli will also forgo the use of a sixth slick compound in the 2027 Formula 1 season. This was revealed by Pirelli motorsport chief Dario Marrafuschi in an exclusive interview with Motorsport.com Italy, a sister platform of Motorsport-Total.com in the Motorsport Network.
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Pirelli had discontinued the softest C6 compound before the current season. The tire was previously used only sporadically on less demanding street circuits and did not fit the concept, as the time difference to the C5 was too small and it offered no strategic advantage.
Therefore, the C6 will not make a comeback in 2027 either: “I can already reveal that there will continue to be five levels; we will not add or remove a level,” confirms the Italian that the current range of slicks will remain.
“We did think about and discuss whether we should add another compound level, but looking at Monaco, we ultimately saw that most cars started on the C4, which was the medium tire,” said Marrafuschi.
Although the C5 tire required an additional warm-up lap for most drivers in qualifying, this did not take anything away from the spectacle of the session, Pirelli believes. “That’s why we don’t think an even softer compound is necessary.”
“We also saw a great race in Monaco, and if we used a C6 there, it would be unusable for the rest of the season,” he said.
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How the compounds C1 to C5 will be designed next year is still open. However, Marrafuschi emphasizes that they want to “regrade the compounds based on the performance targets for next year.”
“The goal is always a clear performance differentiation between the five levels in terms of lap time with proportional wear, so that we can make decisions that lead to slightly overlapping strategies at every Grand Prix weekend,” he says.
This was recently the case in Barcelona and Austria, where two-stop and three-stop strategies were very similar according to the tire manufacturer. Of course, Pirelli knows there are other cases: In Silverstone recently, one- and two-stop strategies were very far apart.
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“But looking ahead to next year, we will work, for example, to bring them much closer together,” promises Marrafuschi. “This way, teams and drivers – provided there are no safety cars or neutralizations – have the scope to choose different strategies by perhaps optimally tuning tire wear to their specific car and thus ensuring more strategic variety.”
The basic foundation for the compounds is already set and was developed in earlier tests; now it’s about fine-tuning. “Once the structure is in place, we will optimize the grading of the compounds for next year based on the results already achieved,” says the Pirelli motorsport chief.
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