Everything we learned about Pirelli’s new tyres for F1 2025 season

Friday’s running session at the Mexican F1 GP was anything but entertaining.

Even so, the teams had an intensive run comparing the current tyres with those Pirelli plans to introduce in 2025, including the new C6 tyre which is intended to resemble the old ultrasoft and hypersoft tyres.

What was the Pirelli tyre test all about?

The teams ran for an hour and a half in FP2 under Pirelli’s guidelines. Each driver had to do five performance laps with 20kg of fuel in its car on both a base tyre -2024 season- and an option test tyre for the 2025 season.

As for the long runs, the plan was the same: compare two tyres head-to-head, but this time doing 12 laps on track with 100kg of fuel in the car.

This was the run plan set for each team and driver:

The initial red flag caused by George Russell stopped the initial run plan and after a long pause due to the change of the TecPro barriers between turns 8 and 9 of the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, the drivers were able to get back on track. At that point, lap times started to improve significantly making the performance comparison unrepresentative in many cases.

However, the comparison between teammates and the best laps achieved after the red flag are useful to evaluate the differences in performance between the 2024 tyres and the ones to be used in 2025.

As for the current C5, the soft tyre, we can see that the new 2025 model seems to be softer and provide more performance. This may also mean that Pirelli has successfully met the objective of improving the overheating of the softer compounds, a recurring complaint from drivers to the Italian manufacturer lately.

In terms of race pace, the 2025 C5 tyre also appears to have yielded positive data as well as performance. The McLaren drivers both completed a solid long run.

But, there is a new experimental tyre that Pirelli wants to introduce in 2025 and the drivers tested during FP2. The new C6 tyre to be introduced to the Italian brand’s tyre range aims to resemble the old ultrasoft and hypersoft compounds by providing more grip, especially on street circuits, and helping to make race strategies more interesting.

Ultimately, though, teams will find the way to manage their tyres more and reduce race pace if that means gaining a time advantage by saving an extra pit stop during the race.

The truth is that it is difficult to assess the one-lap performance of the new compound. However, Yuki Tsunoda who finished FP2 in P3 did so using this season’s C5 tyre, not the new C6.

However, in terms of race pace, everything seems to indicate the aforementioned. The C6 tyre will be a compound that requires high management and therefore, the C5 will be a more preferable option in the race as we can see by comparing the average long run times of both tyres.

But undoubtedly, the surprise tyre of this session was the 2025 C4, the medium tyre. Although in the performance laps it seems to be a tyre similar or even with less pace compared to the 2024 tyre, in race pace it has been a very stable tyre and with which the drivers have achieved good lap times on average.

Therefore, being a very recurrent option this season in the race, having a C4 tyre that allows a bit more stability may mean that drivers can push harder in the race and forget about management in 2025. Obviously, we don’t know to what extent this is the case, but the early data seems positive in this respect.

The drivers will once again test these compounds at the test which will take place as usual in the days after the end of the season in Abu Dhabi. There, a more intensive running will take place and the performance of the new tyres for 2025 can be further evaluated.

It’s very early days, but the new C4 and C5 compounds for 2025 look promising both in terms of performance and race pace. The experimental C6 new softest compound for 2025 though, doesn’t seem to have given the desired results, at least for now.

Obviously, the cars will also be different for next year, but due to the continuity in the technical regulations, the data that both the drivers and Pirelli can extract should not be too far from the reality of what is expected to be an exciting 2025 of F1 racing.

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