Eli5 – F1 cars have smooth tyres for grip yet on a normal car this would be certain death. Why do smooth tyres give F1 cars more grip yet normal cars less grip?

Question

Eli5 – F1 cars have smooth tyres for grip yet on a normal car this would be certain death. Why do smooth tyres give F1 cars more grip yet normal cars less grip?

In: 3088

Answer 1

More rubber in contact with the road means more grip.
A regular car has grooved tires to displace water.
On an F1 car, as soon as it rains, the tires are useless and they put immediately for intermediate tires (lightly grooves) or full wets (even more grooves) in order to displace water. As soon as it starts drying up though, they loose a lot of time being on wet tires, so they go back in to pit for dry tires.

Regular cars don’t have the luxury of putting every time the weather changes. That’s why it only done in a race track where every tenth of a second matters and where budgets are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.