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?
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If you’re equating bald tires on a passenger car to racing slicks, then yes, the bald tires are trouble.
This is due to a few factors:
One is that if a passenger tire is bald, the amount of rubber left on it is very thin, below the minimum amount for safety. This drastically increases the chance of a blowout.
The other is that as tires age, they become hard. A hard tire has less relative grip in most conditions than a soft tire. A bald tire is usually very old. So it’s brittle and very hard. This means less traction.
So you have low traction (or a very low coefficient of friction) coupled with a brittle tire that has minimal rubber left. This is why bald passenger tires are very dangerous.
Race tires generally will meet their minimum rubber thickness well before they become brittle so they retain their traction and integrity. Unless you’re a cheap autox’er like myself and have old track tires, but that’s a different story.
If you’re equating bald tires on a passenger car to racing slicks, then yes, the bald tires are trouble.
This is due to a few factors:
One is that if a passenger tire is bald, the amount of rubber left on it is very thin, below the minimum amount for safety. This drastically increases the chance of a blowout.
The other is that as tires age, they become hard. A hard tire has less relative grip in most conditions than a soft tire. A bald tire is usually very old. So it’s brittle and very hard. This means less traction.
So you have low traction (or a very low coefficient of friction) coupled with a brittle tire that has minimal rubber left. This is why bald passenger tires are very dangerous.
Race tires generally will meet their minimum rubber thickness well before they become brittle so they retain their traction and integrity. Unless you’re a cheap autox’er like myself and have old track tires, but that’s a different story.
Racing tires are different from everyday driving tires in many ways. Most tired are designed to last for tens of thousands of miles or kms and operate at a wide range of temperatures, which requires them to be made of hard rubber that is only moderately sticky. They also need to perform well on imperfect surfaces like gravel or wet asphalt, so they are made with grooves that channel these things out of the way. A grooved tire only makes contact with the portion on the outside. Obviously the deepest cut of the groove doesn’t have any contact with the road. That loss of contact reduces traction but it’s worth it to make a tire that functions in wet and dry conditions.
Racing tires don’t have to worry about any of that. They can be replaced often so they use a softer, stickier rubber that provides more traction. The road conditions are usually perfect so they don’t need grooves most of the time.
If you put tires like these on your car, overall performance would increase, as long as it isn’t cold or rainy. But you’d have to replace the tires every couple of days and your gas milage would likely go down a bit, so it would be very, very expensive.
Racing tires are different from everyday driving tires in many ways. Most tired are designed to last for tens of thousands of miles or kms and operate at a wide range of temperatures, which requires them to be made of hard rubber that is only moderately sticky. They also need to perform well on imperfect surfaces like gravel or wet asphalt, so they are made with grooves that channel these things out of the way. A grooved tire only makes contact with the portion on the outside. Obviously the deepest cut of the groove doesn’t have any contact with the road. That loss of contact reduces traction but it’s worth it to make a tire that functions in wet and dry conditions.
Racing tires don’t have to worry about any of that. They can be replaced often so they use a softer, stickier rubber that provides more traction. The road conditions are usually perfect so they don’t need grooves most of the time.
If you put tires like these on your car, overall performance would increase, as long as it isn’t cold or rainy. But you’d have to replace the tires every couple of days and your gas milage would likely go down a bit, so it would be very, very expensive.
Racing tires are different from everyday driving tires in many ways. Most tired are designed to last for tens of thousands of miles or kms and operate at a wide range of temperatures, which requires them to be made of hard rubber that is only moderately sticky. They also need to perform well on imperfect surfaces like gravel or wet asphalt, so they are made with grooves that channel these things out of the way. A grooved tire only makes contact with the portion on the outside. Obviously the deepest cut of the groove doesn’t have any contact with the road. That loss of contact reduces traction but it’s worth it to make a tire that functions in wet and dry conditions.
Racing tires don’t have to worry about any of that. They can be replaced often so they use a softer, stickier rubber that provides more traction. The road conditions are usually perfect so they don’t need grooves most of the time.
If you put tires like these on your car, overall performance would increase, as long as it isn’t cold or rainy. But you’d have to replace the tires every couple of days and your gas milage would likely go down a bit, so it would be very, very expensive.
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.
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.
With tyres, the grooves/tread are only there to give water somewhere to go.
When it rains in F1 they put wet tyres on which have grooves to let the water escape.
Intermediate tyres have shallower and/or less grooves because there isn’t as much water that needs to escape.
On a car tyre, it is the flat pieces or rubber which grip the road through friction.
For off-road tyres, the deep tread is there to grab onto things instead of using surface to surface friction. Like when you dig in with your toes whilst climbing a muddy hill.
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.
With tyres, the grooves/tread are only there to give water somewhere to go.
When it rains in F1 they put wet tyres on which have grooves to let the water escape.
Intermediate tyres have shallower and/or less grooves because there isn’t as much water that needs to escape.
On a car tyre, it is the flat pieces or rubber which grip the road through friction.
For off-road tyres, the deep tread is there to grab onto things instead of using surface to surface friction. Like when you dig in with your toes whilst climbing a muddy hill.
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