F1 News: Pirelli to test 2025 tires during Mexico City weekend

Formula 1 has announced that the second free practice session of the 2024 Mexican Grand Prix will be extended by 30 minutes, to 90 minutes in duration to allow teams and drivers to participate in a Pirelli tire test for the 2025 season.

Pirelli intends to gather data from the test for further development of the tires before Formula 1 begins its last season of the current regulation era. All three practice sessions usually last for 60 minutes. However, the second practice session in Mexico has been extended for this purpose.

Teams will still conduct their regular preparations for the Mexican GP weekend, as well as fulfilling Pirelli’s testing requirements.

Pirelli tested an even softer version of the current C5 tire towards finalizing plans for the 2025 allocation.

Pirelli F1 boss Mario Isola has stressed that the potential introduction of a sixth compound in 2025 would be implemented with the intention of using it for multiple races.

“The request was to reduce the overheating,” he added.

“We collected quite a lot of good information — we finalized more or less the construction of the 2025 slick tires,” Pirelli Motorsport boss Mario Isola told RACER.

“We have very promising compounds to reduce overheating for 2025.

“The idea is to also introduce a new C6 compound, a softer one, because in the calendar we have more and more street circuits and we need softer compounds.”

“The risk is that if you reduce the overheating they change less, because obviously they can run more laps without high degradation.

“If we go in this direction then we need to have softer compounds in the range to select the compounds properly for each event.

“Obviously, the target we have to encourage a mix between one and two-stop strategies. So we made a proposal to go a bit softer.

“So our proposal was not having any constraints on the number of we homologate.

“We said, ‘Let’s think about a C6, softer than C5, that can open up different strategies’ and we tested one in Paul Ricard a couple of days ago.

“It’s the first attempt but the idea is to go in this direction and probably homologate six compounds next year.”