So I was doing some long stint testing at Nurbergring GP circut to prepare for the first W12 Tour series race next week and I wanted to check time loss for running tires as long as is reasonable. To my surprise the hard compound tire made it about 40 laps before it started to be come very understeery and began losing significant lap time and was frankly not safe to drive.

I kept going on those tires to try to build some data and on lap 45 out of 59 for race distance I get the meatball flag. I come in to the pits to try to figure out what happened and as it turns out my tire tread reached 0% and this triggered the meatball flag. I could have gone 47 laps on those tires before disqualification from the flag (I should have pit before that because I was losing multiple seconds a lap by that point). Changing the tires cleared the flag.

I just wanted to put this out there for anyone preparing for the full length series to watch out for. I am going to be doing more testing on the other compounds to see if they start losing a lot of time and when they meatball.

Anyone else have experience with running the other compounds until the bitter end?

Lap Times I know I'm not fast but just wanted to give the data.

Also something interesting which may contribute to the tires seemingly not losing pace is the tire pressures were dropping over the course of the stint, but the tire temps were not.