why do racecars have to change tires so often? Usually tires are good for much longer than a day.
In: Engineering
formula 1 fan here, not a tyre engineer. But a slightly different view from the comments below (which i agree with) but the tyres in F1 are different compounds to each other, teams have a choice of soft/medium/hard.
This is/was supposed to increase the racing appeal, add strategies options to the teams, another view is the racing is so dull, you can only overtake in the pits.
NB the racing is not that dull, its actually been quiet good last few years, but its an accusation that is sometimes thrown at F1 and maybe there has been some truth in that in the past.
But tyre strategy to increase commercial appeal of F1, make the racing more exciting, “will the tyres fall of a cliff with 5 laps to go” will the guy on new tyres close that gap? woooo exciting !
People did the math. Would it be quicker to have super tough tires that could last an entire race or to have soft tires that needed to be changed frequently?
Turns out swapping would still give you faster times
To add just a bit,
It’s hard to express just how soft the rubber is on racing compound tires because there isn’t much rubber material in our daily lives that’s *that soft*. Maybe the rubber grips and handles on, say, handle bars, or kitchen knives, mop handles… Something you’d almost describe as “delicate” compared to a car tire you’re used to. Rocks and grit on the road WILL stick *in-to* the rubber of these tires, embedding themselves. When you see NASCAR stock cars swerving back and forth behind a pace car, the drivers are trying to clean their tires by rubbing some of that shit off. This is very typical after an accident.
Also, racing compound tires can be extremely sticky. A whatever set of racing slicks will be as sticky as duct tape at ambient temperature. These tires are “cold”, in that they’re nowhere near their stickiest – the driver has to take the car out and drive at speed to warm them up, softening them more, and make them even stickier when they’re hot.
These compounds and the tires overall are designed for performance, not durability. Once they’ve gone through a heat cycle, and cooled, they may have baked out volatile compounds that contributed to their performance. They may have hardened – A LOT, compared to how they’re meant to function, and they may be unrecoverable even if they have plenty of rubber left. Some of the top end performance tires cannot withstand cooling down below their performance envelope at all, or else their grip is severely compromised, and the driver is really just trying to maintain their place until they can pit. F1 cars are designed to be driven flat out non-stop, so a pace lap is a disaster for everyone because everything about that car engineered to be run when hot is cooling down.
Race tires are made out of soft, sticky rubber that maximizes traction. They wear out quickly, especially when cornering at high speed.
Also, they are looking for any edge they can get. If spending a few seconds putting on slightly better tires gets you more than a few seconds in increased performance, it is a win.
Two things going on:
1. The tires are put through a LOT more force than regular road tires. Fast acceleration, hard braking and corners at high speeds. This puts a lot of wear on your tires.
2. Your road tires are designed prioritizing longevity during typical use over quite a few other properties. In contrast something like a formula 1 tire is “soft”, they’re designed to maximize grip on the track due to needing traction to handle extreme forces required to brake, accelerate and corner, but this means they wear a lot faster. Could they make a F1 tire that lasted an entire race? Probably but you’ll be slower and the race rules require at least one tire change so you’re better off going for a tire that gives you every possible edge on speed than you are trying to make a tire last much more than half a race.
The quick and easy answer is race tires are designed for performance not longevity, as soon as racecars start to lose performance in the tire they change them so that they maintain an optimal race pace
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Race tires aren’t like road car all-weathers. The tread compound is designed to absolutely maximize grip and minimize weight at the expense of wear life.
They’re significantly thinner than road tires, and the tread rubber is more like a pencil eraser than the impervious treads of a road car.
It provides phenomenal grip under the right conditions, but it’s also easy to shred off and there’s not a lot of material to lose.
You can gain many seconds a lap with race tires, so even though they don’t survive an entire race you’re still much faster than a car with durable road tires would be. They’re driving on ice and you’re on flypaper.
1) Racing tires are under pretty extreme stress during the race, stresses that normal tires don’t really experience. Thus, it should come as no surprise that they degrade pretty quickly.
2) If your goal is to win the race, you need optimized performance out of the car, which means you need optimal tires. Even if the tires are still perfectly functional, they may have fallen off the performance cliff and thus you’re going to be going more slowly around the track than your competitors on newer tires.
3) It actually *is* possible to design tires that will last the entire race. In many series this is objected to out of cost concerns, but in others the tire degradation is actually deliberate because it helps make the race more interesting. This is doubly true in Formula 1, as the only way to *ensure* teams come into the pits is to swap tires, given that mid-race refueling is banned.
Race car tires are quite different from the tires on your car and are experiencing a lot more stress
Racing tires are quite soft at temperature compared to a normal tire, the softer tires give more grip than harder ones and more grip means faster laptimes. Even your softest street tire is still going to be on the order of a hard racing tire while many racing series have soft, super soft, and even ultra soft tires.
Your touring tire is going to be a solid compound designed to give you 30-75k miles at sustained speeds of up to 85 mph, and cornering forces of about 0.5 gs max. An F1 tire will be experiencing 2 g acceleration, 5 g braking, and up to 6 g turns at speeds of up to 230 mph which will get them far far hotter than your car tire.
Racing tires have traded tire longevity for grippiness and its up to the teams to balance the time loss of swapping tires in a pitstop against the time gain of running grippier tires
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