Why are the highest performance racing (F1) tires soft, but high performance summer tires for consumer cars are hard?
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The ultimate goal for a racing driver is having as much grip as possible at all times. That’s why Pirelli made 3 types of soft tires: Soft, Medium and Hard.
The Soft tires (marked with red strip) can get up to their ideal temperature within a couple corners because on their surface, they are very soft and “mushy” which allows them to get hotter quicker which in turn makes them grip to the surface like molten rubber. Now with the Medium and Hard (Yellow and white stripes respectively), those are harder meaning the surface is much denser. They don’t get up to temp as quick as softs but they last longer (softs last up to 15 laps depending on the track).
Now you might have noticed a pattern here. The harder the tire gets, the more it lasts and the less grip it provides. That’s why road tires are orders of magnitude harder than F1 because they don’t need anywhere near the grip F1 cars need to corner Parabolica at 250Kmh.
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