Pirelli’s new, softer tyre for 2018 will be pink

2018 F1 season

Posted on

| Written by

Pirelli has confirmed the new tyre compound it will introduce in 2018 will be coloured pink.

The softer tyre will be the sixth dry-weather slick compound in their range. It is to join the ultra-soft (purple), super-soft (red), soft (yellow), medium (white) and hard (orange). The intermediate and wet weather tyres are green and blue respectively.

Formula One’s official tyre supplier used the pink colour for its ultra-soft tyres at the United States Grand Prix weekend as an initiative to support breast cancer awareness.

The name for its new tyre has not yet been chosen and fans have been invited to submit their suggestions. Pirelli has proposed ‘megasoft’, ‘extremesoft’ and ‘hypersoft’ as options.

Pirelli will remain at Interlagos following this weekend’s race to conduct a tyre test with McLaren. A further tyre test will be held following the season finale at Yas Marina.

2018 F1 season

Browse all 2018 F1 season articles

Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

Got a potential story, tip or enquiry? Find out more about RaceFans and contact us here.

51 comments on “Pirelli’s new, softer tyre for 2018 will be pink”

  1. 4th soft tyre. Soft > Super soft > Ultra soft is understandable as to which is the softest for new viewers, if a little confusing as to why it’s like that. But where do you go from ultra soft? Each ultra-like synonym is pretty much equal to ultra, unless they completely over-exaggerate it. To be honest, should just move each of the tyres down a tier and get rid of the current hard, as it’s not needed. So medium becomes hard, soft becomes medium, etc.

    1. Maybe they already have unused colored tires they want to reuse for next season?

  2. Its time to make the hard super hard and knock the componds up one. Its ridiculous to have hard, medium and soft…. and then have a super soft, ultra soft and mega soft or whatever they will call it. Beyond the names this all just looks like Pirelli have no idea what they are doing.

    1. @addimaf1 yeah it’s ludicrous

      Furthermore I don’t understand why they are keeping the hard tyre anyway. It’s never used. They’d be much better just shifting all the compounds one softer

      1. @strontium
        They’re not keeping it, they’re just keeping the name. Next year’s “hard” tyres, if they keep that nomenclature, will be similar to this year’s medium tyres.

        1. Ah I was unaware of that, thank you for telling me. I did hear that they were dropping the hard tyre a while ago, but as I had heard nothing since I presumed it was fake news.

          So if that is true it means there will effectively be two new compounds next year

  3. Next thing: it does not switch on. Hard to heat up and then last 50 laps of Barcelona.

  4. MAXIMUM OverSoft

  5. Are those names genuine? Is Pirelli on some satire offensive? Is it a late April Fool’s gag?

    SO MANY QUESTIONS.

    Anyway, it’s pink and it’s soft, it’s the P-Zero Marshmallow.

  6. Ultrasoft-Supersoft-Soft-Medium-Hard-SuperHard-Ultrahard.

    If fewer than 5 compounds, SS is the softest. If 5 or more compounds exist, softest tyre is always US. Move compounds round that as needed.

    If number of compounds exceeds seven, give up and go home. You’ve failed as a tyre supplier.

  7. @Pirelli – option D – as others have said, knock off the hard, and shift the tyre names by one: 2017’s medium becomes 2018’s hard, and so on until 2017’s ultra-soft becomes 2018’s super-soft, upon which this new tyre compound becomes 2018’s ultra-soft.

    However, with a gun to my head, I’d opt for hyper-soft.
    – Extreme-soft somehow makes me think of the full-wet tyres (extreme wet as opposed to intermediates).
    – Mega-soft just sounds ridiculous. Megadeth – yes; mega-soft – sounds like you’re selling mattresses.

    1. @phylyp +1. Sifting through the tweets posted in this first half hour, it seems hypersoft is currently winning. I think they all sound ridiculous, but I dislike megasoft the least. Extremesoft is the worst as it doesn’t make sense (extremely soft makes more sense but is also dreadful). Either way, I’m not too bothered, the end result is still ridiculous

  8. I just cannot see the point. How many races required even medium tyres this season? 2? Then how about just 3 compounds? The current medium would be the hardest, the current super-soft would be the medium and the to be hypersoft would be the softest. All races could be managed easily with a maximum of three stops and usually with the current 1 stop. (maybe a bit more 2 stoppers)

    Easy to understand, more variety due to bigger differences between the compounds. Red-Yellow-White. Red is for red-hot super quick, yellow is for traditional Pirelli yellow, white is for durability and that’s it.

  9. Zantkiller (@)
    12th November 2017, 19:27

    Bring 3 compounds to a race:

    – Rename the softest to be “Soft”
    – Rename the hardest to be “Hard”
    – Rename whatever is in the middle to be “Medium”

    Re-colour the tyres to Red (Soft), White (Medium), Gray/Black (Hard).

    Then Pirelli can then develop 9 or 12 different dry compounds back at the factory without resorting to these silly names.
    It is very simple and stops all confusion. Liberty want the sport to be much simpler for new fans, having a massive collection of tyre compounds and colours to remember isn’t helping.

  10. Ridiculous.

    Why not just bring any given 3 compounds to a race weekend and call them Soft, Medium and Hard. Like they used to with the Bridgestones. At any given race we just had Soft and Hard.

  11. It’s better if they put up a poll to vote.

    1. Indeed it would be much easier and would get more people to vote. Having said that, people tweeting about it probably does more for publicity

  12. Softy McSoftface

  13. MEGASOFT… that’s just ridiculous. Where does Mega or Extreme fit within super and ultra? I’d put mega between super and ultra, but extreme is a bit more than ultra…

  14. Softy McSoftface…?

  15. They just need a scale.

    6 = Hardest
    5
    4
    3
    2
    1 = Softest

    No need to name the intermediate steps!

    Hamilton is running 1’s right now (and repeated every race weekend by Brundle – “If you are new to F1, pink 1’s which we know to be the softest & stickiest, but least durable, with orange 6’s the hardest & least sticky, most durable etc…”)

    1. @psynrg On Sky during Friday practice they said that there talking about going back to the letter scale that was used until the late 90’s.

      I may have it the wrong way round but back then I think ‘A’ was the hardest compound available & ‘G’ (Or whatever the last letter used was) was the softest (Although until the end of 1992 you also had ‘Q’ which were the qualifying compound).

      1. I beg to differ. Having been used to all these names, following letters from A to Z would be a little tough. Easy to identify the extremes. Let’s say we hear this on the commentary–“Driver 1 has changed his tyres and is now running on tyre D” , our intention would be to list down the tyres and find out what D corresponds to. If the list is constant through a period of time, then fans would get used to it. But if they keep adding/changing like the way Pirelli do, then doesn’t make much sense. Confusion will prevail. Colors need to stay though. They make a lot more sense while identifying.

        1. @webtel It may be a bit confusing to begin with as were all used to the actual names, But once we all get used to which letter is the hardest & which is softest it will become easy to figure out.

          Certainly back when I was 1st getting into F1 in 1989 they were using a letter scale & even as a kid (Born in ’83) I always found the letters thing easy to understand.

    2. Yip, can see it now. Driver calls to puts. I need to come in for a Number 2.

      1. Would that be Kimi?

      2. We are switching strategies, go strat 4 code brown

  16. Michael Brown (@)
    12th November 2017, 20:29

    Get rid of the current hard tire.
    Rename the medium tire to hard tire, soft tire to medium tire, and so on. No need for another compound when nobody uses the hard.

  17. Michael Brown (@)
    12th November 2017, 20:32

    -Soft
    -Ridiculously soft
    -Ludicrously soft

    “Soft is too soft.”
    “Soft is too soft?”
    “We need to go to… ludicrously soft!”
    *gasps*
    “Sir we’ve never gone that soft before. I don’t know if the tires can take it!”

    1. @mbr-9 – Spaceballs reference!

  18. “2012 Soft”

  19. So this tyre will basically be 2 steps softer than the current ultra-soft? Pirelli stated that the current ultra-soft will basically be next year’s super-soft, so this basically will be a tyre used only in tracks like Monaco, Russia etc. as a qualifying tyre.

  20. gigasoft
    microsoft
    yugesoft
    bigliestsoft
    cheesesoft

    1. Quality-toilet-paper-on-bum-soft?

      1. I hope the tyres are at least 3 ply

        1. Good thing Pirelli aren’t in the TP business:
          – Delamination can get really messy really fast
          – They’d mandate maximum pressures that should not be exceeded
          – Poor quality causes skid marks. Enough said.

    2. Pirelli decided to be ridiculous about this, so they should call the new tyre Poft, it is the sound they will make when they fail

  21. Softy soft
    So So Soft
    Soft
    Somewhat Medium
    Sertainly Harder
    Super Hard.

  22. Why not call the softest, jelly and the hardest, nuts.

    1. Sundar Srinivas Harish
      13th November 2017, 0:06

      They’d probably get one too many jokes about dose nuts.

  23. Don’t get me wrong, but because it’s pink:

    THE GIRLISH compound! =))

  24. The writers in F1 Racing magazine used to describe everything as “mega” to the point that it got annoying. So Megasoft would be fitting

  25. They were saying on Sky’s Friday practice coverage that Pirelli are talking about doing away with the ‘Super-Soft, Soft etc….’ names are going back to using letter’s as was the way it was up until the late 90’s.

    They also said there are plans been discussed to give teams total freedom on what compounds they use each weekend (Again as was the case until the late 90’s).

  26. I prefer “Squidgy” for the softest.

  27. I vote for “Megasoft”, to go with:

    – Microsoft
    – Millisoft
    – Soft
    – Kilosoft
    – Megasoft

    This would be clear to everyone (except maybe the US, Liberia and Burma).

  28. Nice to know that instead of improving the tyres Pirelli wants to go back to the mockery that was the 2014, 2015 and 2016 seasons.

    Could they just make the best possible tyres? No? ok!

  29. To me the term ‘ultra’ is meant to be the top level in a category. All proposed terms look less than ‘ultra’. Everyone will struggle to understand which one is softer if there’s something supposedly above ultrasofts.
    As others stated, I’m sure they can get rid of another compound, or shift all compounds and create a ‘super hard’ instead.

    1. Proposed pink color look wrong for the softest / quickest compound. Purple had a lot of sense with the link to purple sectors. Now it look like they just chose the next color in their color pencil set.

Comments are closed.