Solved

Tyre compound race performance

How is it that hard tyres seem to have better performance than soft/super soft tyres even at the same state of wear?
Have yet to test and compare the data comprehensively, but it appears that even if during practice and qualifying progressively harder tyres are progressively slower, during the race the harder tyres are able get faster laps even at the same state of fuel and wear. Fastest laps often occur on the hardest tyres
Has anyone tested this out comprehensively? How does race tyre performance vary?

Are you using different push levels? This can make a big difference

In about the same circumstances I find soft/super soft are faster than harder compounds, but in a race those same circumstances about never happen even for a single full lap. Then as longer a (dry) race goes the more grip the track provides from which harder compounds seem to provit more, for some tracks the grip difference between compounds is only marginal then.

More observations:
-Softer tyres run hotter, sometimes, quite often with a bad tyre econ car, this even means you can't even avoid running super softs in the red temps and leaving the optimal temp window costs you laptime.
-The above usually means you can run the harder compounds one push level higher, with hard often two even. On grippier tracks that's more than enough to compensate for the grip difference already.
-To avoid more stops softer compounds are more often run into the red wear area below 50%. That means while harder compounds run their last drops lap(s) on perfect wear the softer have at that time of wear still a few laps in their tanks.
-In terms of fastest laps all that means, especially on super softs, that they usually have very few, if any, optimal laps in a race while hard run quite some laps on good conditions with only weight to count for. So the chance for a good lap with DRS and KERS boosting it even more is higher.

I think I forgot something but that's about my explanation of what happens there.