why do racecars have to change tires so often? Usually tires are good for much longer than a day.
In: Engineering
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.
Latest Answers