Racing
© LGEPR
Pirelli and several Formula 1 drivers say Barcelona has produced the heaviest tyre degradation of the 2026 season so far, leaving Sunday’s 66-lap Spanish Grand Prix likely to be decided by thermal wear and pit-stop timing rather than outright pace.
Track temperatures climbed beyond 50°C through the weekend at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, where teams are using the softer C2, C3 and C4 range instead of the hardest compounds. Simone Berra, Pirelli chief engineer, said degradation reached “up to two or three tenths” per lap, driven by the rough asphalt, the circuit’s energy demands and the heat. He added that Barcelona has the second-highest macro roughness on the calendar after Bahrain, which has pushed both axles into unusually severe thermal degradation.
Drivers were blunt about the scale of the problem. Haas driver Ollie Bearman said, “It’s terrible, to be honest. We have so much air in these tyres now, and it’s just an absolute nightmare.” Lewis Hamilton described the grip as “probably the lowest grip that we’ve had here in, I would say, any year that I’ve been here,” adding: “The tyres only last one lap.”
The conditions have affected qualifying as well as race planning. Berra said the medium and soft were effectively “single-lap tyres” in Barcelona because drivers struggled to cool them enough for another proper attempt. “It’s very, very complicated to recover performance,” he said. “The problem is to cool down the tyres. Even with a double cool, it’s very complicated, the carcass temperature stays very high.”
Pirelli responded after Friday analysis by reducing Saturday’s minimum starting pressures by 1 psi at both ends of the car, setting them at 25.0 psi on the front and 24.0 psi on the rear. The change came after Friday running showed pressures rising beyond expected stabilised levels, adding to the overheating problem.
That leaves strategy as the central story for the race. Berra said a two-stop is “most likely” but added that “possibly it could be also a three-stop race” because the undercut is expected to be strong and teams may be forced to react early if rivals stop. He said management will matter more than trying to extend stints, with all three compounds still potentially usable.
Dario Marrafuschi, Pirelli’s head of motorsport, said the best theoretical option is medium-hard-hard, with stops around laps 15 to 21 and 38 to 44. He also pointed to medium-hard-soft as an alternative, with the second stop pushed later, but warned that traffic could make that route less effective if drivers overheat the tyres while trying to pass.
Max Verstappen starts fifth, about three tenths from pole, and expects the tyre picture to outweigh any grid position advantage. After trying the hard tyre on Friday, the Red Bull driver said, “To be honest, all the tyres were bad. So I think everyone will suffer. It’s just about who will suffer more or less. We’ll see.” He said the race will come down mainly to limiting degradation rather than single-lap pace.
That is a bigger complication for Verstappen than for most of his rivals, because he used a hard-tyre set on Friday and no longer has the two fresh hards needed for Pirelli’s preferred medium-hard-hard strategy. In a weekend where even the front-runners expect to suffer, that could leave Red Bull with fewer straightforward options in the first grand prix of 2026 set to be shaped primarily by tyre survival.