How mastering ‘Pirelli magic’ has become F1’s latest must-have skill

As the Formula 1 grid has got ever closer, detail differences have become more critical in the fight for wins.

One area that is getting increasing attention is tyre behaviour – and especially how to manage them over race stints better than your rivals.

Teams and drivers have quickly come to understand that there are some special tricks needed to master what Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz has labelled ‘Pirelli Magic.’

What he is referring to specifically is a trait that the current generation of tyres have – in that how they behave over a full race stint is entirely dependent on how they are treated in their first few laps out of the pits.

If you go too hard too early, the tyres can overheat and lose performance. But go too slow out of the pits for a nice gentle introduction, then you risk losing track position.

There was perhaps no greater example of this playing out than the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Charles Leclerc’s tyres fell away in the closing stages after he had been forced to push hard early in the final stint as he battled with Oscar Piastri.

That late drama was in contrast to drivers like Sainz and George Russell, whose tyres came alive as they had gone easy on them initially.

As Sainz said about this dilemma between pushing hard or going easy: “It’s a very fine line, very tight method to apply.

“You have to play a bit of the Pirelli magic, depending on the track layout and tarmac, even the compounds, as some compounds are more sensitive to them than others.

“You need to then put the strategy into perspective, evaluate if it’s going to pay off to do it now, or is the undercut/overcut too important to risk that introduction.

“You have so many things to consider during those first three laps of the stint: whether you want to spend your coins on those laps or you want to spend them later in the race.

“It’s very easy to misjudge, because you never know what’s going to happen in the future. And you might have wasted your coins in something that was not worth it.”

So what is really going on here to trigger this phenomenon?

The key element of this ‘Pirelli magic’ relates to tyre temperatures, and how that can be so heavily influenced by the introduction of fresh rubber.

As Pirelli’s head of F1 and car racing Mario Isola said: “It’s a matter of thermal behaviour of the compound.

“The transition between 70 degrees [which…