Graining at the Madring has turned the Hard into Madrid’s race tyre

Pirelli arrived in Madrid expecting a smooth new surface to be kind to its rubber. After one day of running, the company’s chief engineer is pointing at the compound almost nobody used.

“The Hard tyre represents the most important option for the race,” Simone Berra said after second practice, citing degradation levels higher than Pirelli had initially expected and the high temperatures forecast for the rest of the weekend. That is a significant statement about a circuit with no racing history, and it lands on teams who have barely sampled the C2.

Final practice starts at 12:30 local time, qualifying at 16:00. Both sessions now carry more weight than a normal Saturday.

Only two drivers ran the Hard all day

Gabriel Bortoleto took the C2 out in first practice. Nico Hulkenberg ran it in the second hour and set the benchmark on the compound with a 1:35.746. That is the entire body of evidence Formula 1 has on the tyre Pirelli now expects to decide Sunday’s race.

The Medium did the heavy lifting instead, accounting for 58 per cent of all laps completed on Friday. Oliver Bearman squeezed 23 laps out of a single set of C3, the highest mileage anyone managed on one set. Charles Leclerc got 17 laps from one set of the C4 Soft.

Pirelli’s own tally puts the imbalance in plain numbers. The field covered 3,233 kilometres on the Medium and 2,225 on the Soft across Friday. On the Hard it covered 135, spread over two sets.

If the Hard really is the race tyre, someone has to learn it in the next hour of running, and every lap spent on the C2 in final practice is a lap not spent preparing for qualifying.

Half a second covers the Medium and the Soft

Berra also flagged that the performance gap between the two softer compounds came in smaller than Pirelli’s models predicted, averaging around half a second.

Kimi Antonelli’s own numbers make the point more sharply. His quickest Soft lap, the 1:33.662 that topped the day, sits just 0.264 seconds clear of the 1:33.926 he set on the Medium in the same session. That was the fastest Medium lap of the day by anyone.

A gap that small changes the strategy calculation. Teams have had a free choice of tyre for the race start since 2022, so nobody is locked into the rubber they qualify on, and on these numbers a Medium start looks considerably more attractive than it did on Thursday.

Graining showed up on both left-hand tyres

The cause is the surface itself. Berra described grip levels as among the highest seen all season, and that combination is exactly what brings on graining.

It appeared on both the front left and the rear left, in some cases heavily, and it hit the cars that slide most. Berra added that differences between the teams are already becoming apparent in terms of who can manage the tyres more effectively over a stint, which is a polite way of saying some cars were eating their left side and others were not.

Track temperature peaked at 51C at the start of second practice, with air temperature at 32C. Saturday is forecast warmer still.

Mercedes led both sessions, with different drivers

George Russell dominated the opening hour with a 1:34.077, as covered in our first practice report. By the afternoon he had slipped to fifth while his team mate took over at the front.

Behind Antonelli, Leclerc finished 0.113 seconds back, with Lewis Hamilton third on a 1:33.811 after a scare on the exit of Turn 17 that ended millimetres from the barrier. All three started the session on new Mediums before switching to the Soft for their quickest laps.

Arvid Lindblad was fourth, and also the reason the session stopped, after putting his car into the barriers at Turn 13. The full picture is in our second practice report.

The red flag cost the field its long runs

That crash did more damage to the weekend’s data than to the championship order. Berra was blunt about it: the stoppage “reduced both the number and length of the long runs, limiting the amount of information available from a race perspective”. Nobody has a confident read on race pace as a result.

Alpine managing director Steve Nielsen still counted Friday a success. “It’s a great track, challenging for both the drivers and the teams, and we collected a lot of data, which is positive,” he said.

The drivers are enjoying it regardless. Hulkenberg called the circuit “incredibly fast, almost like a rollercoaster, with very little room for error, so it keeps you on your toes all the way around”. Pierre Gasly, 11th in second practice, was just as taken with it: “I really loved the track. It’s very exciting, it’s high-speed and gives you a real adrenaline rush lap after lap.”

Our Madring circuit preview covered why the layout was always going to punish small mistakes. Friday confirmed it: first practice ran clean but produced a steady stream of deleted lap times for track limits.

Our take: qualifying is worth more here than the pace suggests

Mercedes look quick over one lap, but the team with the tidiest long run on Saturday afternoon is the one to back for Sunday, and right now nobody outside the garages knows who that is.

The more useful takeaway is Berra’s advice on how to attack the session. He expects the first flying lap to be the one that counts, because thermal degradation builds on a second push lap, and he singled out traffic as a potential deciding factor.

On a circuit where every driver wants clear air and a final run, that is a recipe for a messy end to Q1 and Q3. Expect at least one fast car to be caught out.

Three things that will shape the grid

Watch who spends time on the Hard in final practice, because that team has already decided the C2 is Sunday’s answer and is willing to give up preparation to prove it.

Watch the left front of any car that slides. Graining separated the field on Friday and it will separate it again in the race.

Watch the queue at the pit exit in the closing minutes of qualifying. One clean lap is worth more than one extra attempt here.

Follow every session as it happens on the RNT-Motorsports live blog.