[Pasha Paterson]

Each car has its own selection of tire compounds that are available. For the 20-minute races, a set of mediums is plenty, but whether you can sustain a set of softs depends largely on the car. I know the Nissan Primera BTCC would chew through soft tires like a kid with unlimited access to his Halloween candy on November 1. For the one-hour races, most of which require a pit stop, and some of which use accelerated tire degradation (170% or 200%), it's a similar story, where two stints on mediums should be easily doable, but one long stint on M followed by a short stint on S is a viable alternate strategy. It's rare that you'd ever go for the hardest compound unless the track itself is particularly abusive.