F1 to use “improved” Tyre Performance graphic following Pirelli criticism

2019 Mexican Grand Prix

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Formula 1 will continue to use its new Tyre Performance graphic which was criticised by the sport’s official tyre supplier Pirelli.

The new graphic, introduced during the last round of the championship in Japan, will be seen again during today’s Mexican Grand Prix broadcast, the series promoter has confirmed. It shows percentage values representing the ‘condition’ of each tyre on a driver’s car.

Pirelli motorsport director Mario Isola said he was “surprised” by the appearance of the graphic during the Suzuka race. He stressed Pirelli was not involved in its creation, and raised concerns the data it shows could be “misleading”.

In a statement issued ahead of today’s race F1 said the Tyre Performance graphic had been “improved” since the Japanese Grand Prix. According to F1 the graphic provides “detailed, real-time information on the current condition for all four individual tyres on a chosen car, presented as a percentage value on a scale between ‘new tyre with no wear’ (100%) and a ‘used tyre’ at the end of its effective performance lifespan (0%).

“The % value indicates how much of the tyre performance capability has been used thus far into the stint; this value is not to be confused with tyre wear which instead refers to the amount of actual rubber removed from the tyre during the usage period. Lower values indicate a proportional loss in tyre performance via tyre degradation.”

The values are calculated without using any data from Pirelli. F1 uses publicly available data analysed to generate the graphics, which are branded by sponsor AWS.

Formula 1’s director of broadcast media Dean Locke told RaceFans F1 uses “what the teams do in their strategy” to arrive at its ‘tyre condition’ figures.

“We took all the parameters we had, put them in this huge algorithm, a model, plotted that model, ran [and] tested that model for eight to 12 weeks using all the different races that we can and trying to see what we got.

“It takes in a huge amount of parameters: What the car is doing, where it was, the tyre drop-off. It’s about performance of the tyre.

“There was a slight misconception of ‘the tyre’s about to explode’: It is the lap time drop-off that tyre.”

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11 comments on “F1 to use “improved” Tyre Performance graphic following Pirelli criticism”

  1. GtisBetter (@)
    27th October 2019, 18:17

    F1 to invent “improved” Tyre Performance graphic following Pirelli criticism

    Fixed that headline

  2. Can’t say i’m a fan of some of this stuff. Do we really need to know the condition of the tires?

    Surely seeing a more accurate graphic that shows that a driver has taken all the life out of his tires just as he has caught upto the back of another and will therefore not be able to really attack or try to overtake is just going to take away all the excitement of that potential scrap before it’s even begun.

    I have always felt that less is more because if you give too much information (Especially when it’s accurate) then you start to take away some of the unknown & unexpected elements that can help make the sport more exciting to watch.

    1. 100% agree. It’s not as hideous as the ‘chance of overtake’ graphic but getting there!

      I relate it to watching football… you’re not presented with ‘chance of goal’ or graphics showing ‘player fatigue’. Instead you let the game itself be the entertainment and part of the viewer engagement is working it out for yourself.

  3. Somehow I completely missed (prior to the end of Japan’s GP) that all this is a total fake data created by AWS, and thought it is relying on sensor’s, teams’ and Pirelli’s data.

    Thankfully they called it “algorithm”, rather than totally fake but fancy “AI”… anyway – scrap it!

    We have lot’s of other fake things in F1, we’ll do just fine without fake graphics.

  4. Well, I haven’t missed a qualifying or race since 1997 (French GP qualifying 1999 excluded) and I needed to read this article, paying particular attention to all the quotes, to get a reasonable idea of what the graphic means. And I still don’t entirely get it, or see how it can be genuinely accurate or useful.

    Good luck to anyone who’s tuning in for the first time today…

  5. They should be able to have a video camera watching each tire and then AI software evaluating the tire condition in real-time. The video AI inspection systems have been in use in factories with high speed production lines.

    1. GtisBetter (@)
      27th October 2019, 19:11

      They are, but they just want to put a sponsor name on the screen, so made up numbers are just as good and a lot cheaper and easier.

  6. Soo, will be interesting to hear how they improved it, didn’t seem all that much different to me when they used it before the 1st pitstops. And then didn’t to indicate Hamilton – maybe because their sim. would show it all in red for a large part, which was clearly not the case?

  7. So, the improvement seemed to be that the title said “Tyre performance” instead of “Tyre condition”. Then again, we only saw this graphic twice (?) on the world feed, so did not really bring anything new to the broadcast.

  8. Would prefer to see better information on laptimes than a meaningless graph trying to show the same thing but through guestimated tyre wear. Why not use actual, factual data?

  9. Perhaps they just need to remove the percentages? Having the colors along the number of laps done on it would be sufficient without adventuring into approximations.

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