Can a tyre recover once it is past the cliff?

Post-cliff tyre behaviour by compound: how often a worn tyre shows pace recovery when the driver backs off, and whether the wear is thermal (recoverable) or structural (not).

Once a tyre is past the degradation cliff, is it gone, or can the driver nurse some pace back by lifting off? The recovery forecast answers that by looking only at post-cliff laps and asking how often, and how strongly, a tyre shows a partial recovery and critically, whether the wear is thermal (surface, recoverable) or structural (bulk, not).

What it shows

The chart breaks post-cliff recovery into three signals per compound:

• Recovery rate (recovery_flag): the fraction of post-cliff laps where the model flags any partial pace recovery. This runs very high across all compounds (~86–89%) because the flag fires on any positive deviation from the cliff slope, however small.
• Average recovery probability: the model’s probabilistic estimate of how likely a lap with the observed surface/bulk load split is to recover. This is far more discriminating than the binary flag typically 21–29%.
• Surface/bulk ratio: the ratio of surface thermal load to bulk mechanical load. Below ~0.4 the wear is bulk-driven (compound breakdown, hard to recover); above ~0.4 it is mixed or surface-driven (thermal, can partially recover with reduced push).

Only post-cliff laps are included the feature is silent about pre-cliff behaviour, which the degradation timeline covers.

How to use it

1. Select a compound to see its post-cliff recovery profile.
2. Trust the probability over the rate the near-universal recovery rate is a low bar; the average recovery probability is the number that separates compounds.
3. Read the surface/bulk ratio to know why a tyre can or cannot recover: a low ratio means structural breakdown that lifting won’t fix.
4. Cross-reference a real stint in the pit strategy Gantt to see whether a driver who extended was riding recoverable thermal wear or terminal structural wear.

Reading the signal correctly

A high recovery rate does not mean tyres bounce back to fresh pace it means a measurable, often tiny, deviation above the cliff slope. The magnitude lives in the average recovery probability, not the flag.

Surface/bulk ratios near the ~0.4 boundary are ambiguous: the same lap can read as thermal or structural across nearby laps. Treat the boundary as a soft transition, not a hard switch.

Data source

The chart queries int_tyre_surface_vs_bulk_decoupling via DuckDB-Wasm in the browser, using post-cliff laps only.

Column	Meaning
recovery_flag	Whether a lap shows any positive deviation from the cliff slope
recovery_probability	Model probability the lap genuinely recovers, averaged per compound
surface_bulk_ratio	Surface thermal load ÷ bulk mechanical load (the recoverability split)

The data window covers 2018–2024, post-cliff laps only.

For the full model definition, see the int_tyre_surface_vs_bulk_decoupling reference.