Why F1 must find a solution to its wasted tyres problem

While Formula 1 continues to make good gains in improving its sustainability, one of the most obvious areas of wastage clearly still needs addressing.

With the quest to reduce environmental impact being all about marginal gains rather than delivering a silver bullet solution, it is quite remarkable that F1 finds itself left with so many unused tyres over the course of a season.

The reality of this situation emerged in an info document that Pirelli sent out on Thursday detailing some interesting stats from the 2024 season – which included the fact that F1’s tyres cumulatively covered a distance of 334,942.175 kilometres over 65,534 laps.

Tucked away amid the data were some interesting numbers related to the number of sets delivered – and especially how many ended up not being called into action at all.

Pirelli says it supplied teams will a total of 8016 new sets in 2024 – which was divided up into 6100 sets of slicks and 1916 of wet weather rubber (1428 inters and 488 wets). Of this total, 2718 sets were never used – which is around 34% of the entire supply.

Some of these were rain tyres that were never required, but there were a fair few slicks that also never saw the light of day.

Pirelli says that 935 sets of slicks – just more than 15% of the total taken to races – were fitted to rims and never left the garage.

Furthermore, 948 sets of slicks (15.5%) completed between just one and three laps – being used either just for qualifying or in quali sims in practice.

The number of totally unused tyres is quite eye-opening when put in the context of all these tyres effectively being wasted resources on two fronts.

First, there is the question of effort and materials, in terms of manufacturing and then needing to destroy and recycle these sets.

Then beyond that there are transportation considerations to take into account too based on flying this rubber all the way around the world for nothing.

It is little wonder that Pirelli itself noted in its document: “The issue of more efficient tyre usage during the race weekend remains on the table.”

Finding a solution

The issue of wasted tyres is something that Pirelli has been pushing hard on in recent years, and improvements have already been made for 2024.

This came through the use of a ‘strip and fit’ policy for extremes and inters – meaning that tyres that were mounted at one race could be stripped and refitted for…