This weekend sees the teams and drivers take to the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari in the heart of Italy’s motorsport valley for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. It’s a technical, anti-clockwise, old-school circuit which has played host to a championship grand prix 31 times in its history. But there’s nothing old-school about the tyres Pirelli are providing the teams with, which could shake things up…

They’ve chosen to go a step softer with the compound range than last year; a theme we’ve seen at the past two race weekends in Jeddah and then Miami too, as Pirelli look to play their part in creating strategic variation on race day. For Imola, that means the C4 will be the hard, the C5 will be the medium, and the brand-new C6 will make its debut as the soft.

The C6 was introduced to Pirelli’s lineup for this year as an ultra-soft option intended for use at some street tracks, but the choice to bring it to a permanent circuit like Imola was an “aggressive” one according to Mario Isola, Pirelli’s motorsport director.

“It was designed for street circuits or low severity circuits. And Imola is not so low. It is on the low side, but it’s not as low as a street circuit like Monaco.”

It’s Imola’s asphalt’s reasonably low abrasion, as Isola said, that makes it a candidate for evaluating the C6 despite how its high, aggressive kerbs can punish the tyres mechanically. Given that no team tested the C6 in Bahrain, as that it’s a track that’s much tougher on tyres, it’s important for Pirelli to evaluate the new compound’s performance to inform how it could be used as scheduled in Monaco and Montreal, or even later this season.

An important test for strategy

The C6 is unlikely to feature in the teams’ race strategies, given that its focus is on maximum one lap grip rather than race stint durability, but the step softer for the medium and hard tyres could force a two-stop option unlike last year where the one-stop proved most competitive. 

15 drivers started on the medium (C4), 3 on the hard (C3) and 2 on the soft (C5), but out front, Verstappen struggled to take his hard tyres all the way to the end as they fell out of the operating window and began to lack grip. This generated a stunning chase between Norris and Verstappen for the win, but could also show that a similar one-stop medium-hard strategy will be harder to follow on the softer compounds this year.

But playing against this option is the time a pitstop costs a team in Imola. It’s the longest pit lane on the calendar with 548 metres spent on the pit-limiter, meaning a stop costs a driver around 28 seconds. With the lap only being 4.909km, this is significant, and will mean the teams are likely to avoid stopping twice unless they absolutely have to.

Where the softer compounds could make the biggest difference for the teams therefore is in qualifying, which plays an important role in forming a driver’s race as overtaking is not the easiest here. Managing warmup for the more fragile ultra-soft C6 compound while balancing traffic management around the shorter, relatively quick lap will make it all the more challenging for the teams and drivers to find a gap and set their lap times.

In many ways, this weekend represents something of a test of whether producing an ultra-soft, or softer compounds in general, can generate the strategic variation and unpredictability in race management that creates exciting on track battles. If it can work in Imola, given that its characteristics strongly push it to being a one-stop, then Pirelli can be more confident that it’s a route worth pursuing in the future.