I am a relatively new fan to Formula1. So, one of the staple aspects in the sport is changing of tyres as they wear out quickly and become unusable because they travel at such high speeds. If so, do people that own super cars like Lamborghini Aventador, Koenigsegg Agera keep changing their tyres too?
Thanks in Advance!
In: Technology
F1 tyres are soft. Unbelievably soft. The softer the rubber compound is, the grippier the tyre will be and it will allow high speed cornering and power transfer during immediate acceleration. However, this softness also means they get worn down quickly.
It’s by design – F1 tyres degrade out quickly and are notoriously difficult to get into the right “working window” (the temperature where they perform well) because F1 want to encourage drivers/teams to make more pitstops because it’s more interesting for the fans strategy wise.
Pirelli could make a tyre that lasts a whole race, but F1 don’t want them to.
To answer the second part of your question: yes a car that is being used for racing will wear it’s tyres out quicker (for reasons explained in other replies here) but in F1 it’s artificially exaggerated as I said.
When you drag chalk across the floor, pushing down on it makes it use more chalk
F1 cars are designed to take corners ridiculously fast, to do this they need a lot of grip. That grip comes in the form of downforce by utilising air to increase the amount of downward force on the car.
Similar to the rock, the force from the air pushing down on the car into the road (and therefore the tires) makes them erode faster.
If you’re racing a supercar often, you will need to change the tires more often than you would on a standard car. It really depends on how the supercar is used.
Heavier cars tend to go through tires more as well.
It’s a combination of the speed, and using very soft compounds that give better grip.
But for a road-going car you do not need quite that level of grip and can use a tougher tyre compound, and when stuck in a traffic jam on the M6, your ability to go around corners at 120mph+ is very limited.
But powerful cars can eat tyres, especially the drive wheels if driven hard. It’s just that few are very often.
When James May drove the Bugatti Veyron, he mentioned that the tires only last 12 minutes at top speed.
Most people don’t drive their supercars anywhere near top speed most of the time, and typically they don’t put a lot of miles on them at all.
The thing about F1 is that it’s a race, and they know they need to go through a certain number of sets of tires in the race because of required pit stops. So there’s no reason to design a tire to last, and every reason to design a tire for maximum performance that’s completely used up by the time it needs to be swapped out
F1 tires are designed that way. The softest tire delivers maximum ‘grip’ the first few laps and ‘drop off’ after that. F1 drivers also push their cars to the limit, almost every corner during qualification is ‘we either get through the corner or we crash/spin”. This also wears out the tires a lot faster.
Tires for a Lamborghini Aventador on the road are not designed that way and usually last longer. You are usually not taking corners on public roads at 200kph. But you can also buy expensive special racing slicks (which are not road-legal) to race on tracks, and those tires wear out fast as well.
You can compare this design a bit to fuel for a fire. If you want a fire that burns quickly and bright you can use petroleum wax blocks. If you want a fire that lasts a lot longer, you use wooden blocks, but that fire is less bright and takes longer to start.
The tires are soft for more grip and wear out faster because it grips the asphalt better
Also im pretty sure michelin made tires wear out even faster just so there would be more pitstops and give viewers something more to watch durning the race
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