One of the most crucial and difficult parts of the inaugural Spanish Grand Prix hosted at Madring was the tyre strategy. Under immense pressure, how did the tyres hold up?
At the end of the day the 2026 Spanish Grand Prix hosted at the new Madring was more of a race of strategy and not speed.
This was made evident from the results, with Kimi Antonelli winning the Grand Prix after getting a taste of his lead post virtual safety car (VSC) and Lando Norris standing on the last spot of the podium after starting the race on pole and maintaining the steady lead until it all came down to a mishap with tyre strategy.
New Asphalt at Madring
With a new circuit comes new paving and the new asphalt used at the Madring is reported as the highest grip asphalt of the entire season.
The asphalt is a bituminous mix compound that uses about 5% bitumen, a thick form of petroleum, that is slippery and smooth. Bitumen becomes even more slippery when heavy traffic and heat compress the compounded asphalt in a phenomenon known as bitumen bleeding.
Bitumen bleeding makes the asphalt even more greasy and slippery. The event host planned for this and had the track sprayed off with high compression water jets a couple days before track action, but there was still some bleeding from the intense pressure due to the nature of the race weekend with all the cars continuously going round.
Tyre Degradation and Graining
The high speed corners also contributed to the extreme degradation due to the cars sliding, especially with the rear axle. In FP2 Arvid Lindblad crashed at the exit of Turn 12 from the same issue, his rear axle slid out after the banked corner.
The tyres saw more graining on the left side throughout the weekend, the smooth track and high grip being the perfect combination for the peak stress point of the car, leading to tyre tears. The corners at Madring themselves are already harder to manage and the increased stress led to more than tyre stress but mid corner understeer as well.
Free Practice Data
From data observed in the first day of free practice it is observed that the lap times increased exponentially as the tires were used more.
In FP1 Liam Lawson set a flying lap on softs and then in just 5 laps his lap time reflected a loss of 3 seconds. Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon both experienced something similar in FP2, each losing over 2 seconds in just 4 laps on mediums.
Pirelli Expectations
The Pirelli chief engineer, Simone Berra, was asked about his outlook for how the tyres would hold up during the race weekend at Madring and he expressed his surprise saying “they were outside our range of expectation”.
From Pirelli statistics it is seen that the cars experienced a range of loss from 0.2-0.3 seconds every lap on average, of course with some being more extreme than others.
Strategic Pit Stops
The average pit-stop time at the Madring is 24 seconds, so planning when to change tyres requires careful strategy and tyre feedback throughout the race.
A strategic element came into play when a VSC was deployed on lap 15 of which many drivers took advantage of to change from their starting tyres to hard tyres to last the rest of the race.
The top two places on the podium, Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen, both benefitted from this as well as many other drivers but current world champion Lando Norris just narrowly missed the pit slot, a mistake that would cost him the win.
Hards were carrying the majority of the race as most best laps were on hard tyres (10/15) and every best stint were on hard tyres as well. The C2 tyres have a stiffer molecular compound than its counterparts making the micro graining more sustainable during the race.
