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