In Monaco, walking a single cart of used tyres from the pit lane to a quiet depot across from the harbour showed how much of Formula 1’s race day happens out of sight – and how that hidden Pirelli workflow now links directly to F1’s Net Zero 2030 goals.
From trackside, Formula 1 is all noise and spectacle: cars exploding out of the final corner, mechanics poised in the pit lane, hospitality decks buzzing above it all.
Shift your gaze a few metres, though, and a different choreography appears: the steady, almost anonymous movement of Pirelli tyres to and from the pit lane, along service alleys and past hospitality structures, on low carts guided by people in team kit and Pirelli gear.
We followed a tyre cart as it emerged from the pit lane through the paddock service gate and walked with it down the service road to the Pirelli depot across from the moored TAG Heuer yacht. In a few minutes, that walk turned the abstract language of ‘tyre life cycles’ and ‘Net Zero 2030’ into something we could literally trace with our own steps. Watch those carts long enough and a pit stop or a stack of tyres stops being ‘just rubber.’ Each movement becomes a line in a logistical script linking the Sunday show to the sport’s climate promises.
The tyres’ visible life starts well before they ever see a timing sector. Early in the morning, Pirelli’s corner of the harbour is already active. Behind the tent sit the racks: hards, mediums, softs, plus intermediates and wets stacked in neat columns, each bar-coded and allocated. Somewhere in a control system, every single tyre has a digital twin and a plan.
Monaco’s lack of space forces everything into tight corridors. Pirelli staff and mechanics load sets onto low two- or four-wheel carts-four tyres stacked upright or laid flat, sometimes already on rims, sometimes bare. The carts peel off toward the pit lane one by one, sharing narrow paths with camera crews and guests. From a spot across from the TAG Heuer yacht, there’s a constant trickle of these carts between the depot and the garages. They emerge from Pirelli’s corner, cross the service road opposite the yachts, and vanish into the shadows behind the pit buildings before reappearing in the full glare of the pit lane. It looks mundane, but it feeds every run plan up and down the grid.
On Sunday, that choreography matters as much as any sector time. Mandatory stops at Monaco turn tyre life into track position, and every lap a driver stays out on a fading set is a chance for someone behind to undercut. Standing by the service road, we could tell when a team was committing early: a fresh set would leave the harbour tent and, a couple of laps later, the matching cart would trundle back from the garages with tyres that had just surrendered a place on track. We started checking the timing screens to see if our hunches were right.
Inside the garages, tyres are mounted on rims if they aren’t already, slipped into warming blankets, and wheeled to the front of the box. On TV, this appears as ‘they bolted on the mediums.’ In reality, that step depends on a supply chain that started at the harbour tent. When a car dives into the box, attention snaps to the crew: jacks, wheel guns, drivers nailing the marks. Track the tyres instead, and each stop becomes a hand-off between team and supplier.
The new set arrives on a small trolley. The mechanics mount them; the car fires back into the fast lane; and the set that comes off immediately starts its journey in the other direction. Those four tyres are stacked and rolled into the darker, less photogenic part of the garage. After a mid-race stop in Monaco, one of those used sets ended up on the cart we were shadowing-sidewalls streaked with pickup, surfaces still giving off heat. A minute earlier, they were part of a strategy call. Now they were material to be processed by the same company that had built them. For the team, the stop ends when the car rejoins the track. For Pirelli, that’s when the second half of the tyre’s life begins: logging, inspection, and, eventually, disposal.
That strip of tarmac across from the TAG Heuer yacht might be one of the most revealing places at the circuit. On one side of the fence sits the branded yacht, VIPs on deck, cameras capturing the glamour. Along the same fence line, a white ‘Monaco Circuit – Boat Shuttle’ sign with a bold red arrow points guests toward the launches. Above the fencing, a tall black structure with a thin red border carries the F1 logo alongside Pirelli’s, ‘Global Tyre Partner of Formula 1’ printed underneath so anyone walking the harbour path knows who occupies this patch of ground.
Following the cart, we watched the mechanic steer around freight cases, coils of cable, and the back doors of hospitality units. Above us, people framed the harbour on their phone screens. At ground level, four used tyres rolled by into a fenced-off corner of Pirelli’s tyre depot. Session by session, the same loop played out. Carts left with fresh tyres came back with used sets stacked two or three high. In practice, the flow was slow; in qualifying, it spiked; in the race, you could almost read pit windows from how often a cart appeared carrying tyres that still looked warm.
Inside, tyres stop being anonymous and start becoming information. First, each one is scanned so the system knows exactly which driver, session, and stint it came from. Then comes the physical inspection-sometimes cursory, sometimes forensic. The set we followed was lined up with others from the same phase of the race. Technicians crouched over them, fingers tracing blistered patches and edges chewed up by kerbs. What looked smooth from a distance showed layers of detail up close: feathered grain where a driver leaned too hard on the fronts, torn shoulders from kerb-hopping, clean, even wear on a carefully managed long run.
Just outside the main tent, a smaller dark-blue canopy shelters more equipment and a neat column of mounted tyres, coloured sidewalls facing the harbour. Power cables snake across the tarmac between cases and compressors, turning a temporary awning into the last stations of a mobile factory line. Each cart returning from the garages delivers as much evidence as waste. The marks fans call ‘degradation’ become data points for Pirelli’s engineers: did the compound behave as expected, did the wear curve match simulations, did the construction cope with Monaco’s bumps and traction zones? That feedback shapes how many tyres they bring, which compounds they select, and how they tweak constructions-choices that influence both the racing and the tyre programme’s footprint.
By Sunday, the depot feels like a warehouse at the end of a long shift. Used tyres accumulate in clearly marked zones: hards here, mediums there, softs in another stack, wets and intermediates off to one side. After the podium and fireworks, the stacks are close to full. Then it’s pure logistics. Teams must return all tyres-used or unused-by the end of the event. Once checks are complete, stacks are wrapped and loaded into containers. At that point, the tyres are no longer race tools; they’re bulk material headed to facilities where they’ll be shredded and repurposed as tyre-derived fuel or other secondary products. It isn’t a perfectly circular loop, but it’s a long way from tyres disappearing into unregulated dumps. Every set is scanned, counted, and pushed into a controlled recycling stream as part of the sport’s climate ambitions.
Formula 1 has committed to being Net Zero Carbon by 2030, and Pirelli’s latest tyre deal is part of that push. Tyres are one of the few things the series still consumes in bulk every weekend, which makes how many it builds, how it makes them, and what happens after the flag unusually important. In Monaco, you can see all three levers at once: trimmed allocations mean fewer sets being shuttled on carts, compounds come from factories that now run on cleaner energy, and every used tyre is logged and sent into a controlled recycling stream instead of disappearing into general waste.
Following that cart from the pit box to the depot gate turned those big ideas into a route we could walk in a few minutes. Net Zero stopped being a slogan and, at least in this corner of the harbour, became a series of small, trackable movements. Stand by that service lane, count carts and read the story in stacks of rubber, and tyres start to look like a quiet pillar holding up the rest of Formula 1’s ambitions. Performance and safety get all the attention. Sustainability and credibility live in the details-how many tyres are made, how they’re used, where they go when the weekend is over. From the grandstands or the yacht decks, you don’t see any of this. You see coloured sidewalls, clouds of marbles, and the occasional strategy gamble gone wrong. But once you’ve followed a cart from the Monaco pit lane to the Pirelli depot, watched it cross that strip of asphalt opposite the TAG Heuer yacht and seen its load disappear into a container on Sunday night, it’s hard not to read the whole weekend as a moving carbon ledger-written, one rolling stack of tyres at a time.