Final day of Pirelli testing: Bottas and Vesti on track
The final day of Pirelli 2026 tyre development testing took place on Wednesday, October 29, in Mexico City. Kicking off the action was Valtteri Bottas, third driver for the Mercedes-AMG F1 team, at the wheel of a mule car based on the current W16 chassis.
The Finnish driver tested the softer compounds in the range, from C3 to C6, in a similar programme to that carried out by Sauber’s Gabriel Bortoleto on Tuesday. Most of the work focused on the hardest compound within that range, which is most often chosen for race weekends during the season.
After several performance runs, each preceded by a warm-up lap to bring the tyres up to the correct temperature, Bottas completed the evaluation of the C3 compound with a series of long runs.
Bottas carried out a similar run plan, including performance runs, with the remaining compounds – chosen based on the tests conducted by Bortoleto the previous day – to analyse performance differences in terms of lap time and degradation levels.
In the late afternoon, Frederik Vesti (who participated in FP1 at the Mexico Grand Prix for Mercedes) took over the car, testing several different tyre structures throughout 10-lap runs.
The best time set by the Danish driver was 1m19.657s on lap 41, while Bottas set a benchmark of 1m18.204s on lap 109. These lap times, however, are not relevant to each other, as each driver was following a different programme.
Over the course of the day, a total of 161 laps were completed (112 laps for Bottas and 49 for Vesti) covering 693 kilometres, in track conditions very similar to those of the previous day with asphalt temperature peaking at 49°C. A total of 1,278 kilometres were covered at the Hermanos Rodríguez circuit during the two days of testing.
The next test for the 2026 tyres is scheduled for Tuesday, December 9, in Abu Dhabi, at the official test with all the teams after the final grand prix of the season.
