2023 Tyres Thread

[KimiRai]

Something else looks to have moved it too...in comparison to last year and first half of this season...tyre change appears to have moved this chassis and AMR backwards in regard to single lap hot pace, both those two being the most gentle on their tyres in race pace for first part of season.
That shift seems to assist MB McL and FER in race tyre longevity as all relatively appear to benefit in tyre life at fast race pace.
That's consistent with what you'd expect from those changes, more durable under duress, but likely to be more difficult to pull into immediate action for those that were ok on previous iteration. Fairly subtle, but there all the same and has benefited the races overall.

Yes, the obvious "technical" qualifier (not qualifying as in F1) for me is that there's no point changing it in the first place if it didn't do anything at all
Conventionally, a shift to a more durable carcass involves incorporating less flex into it, effectively load range index. That will then support more load at same flex, or same load at reduced flex. The aim being to prevent the carcass going over temp and causing likely structural failure. Thats just conventional tyre engineering.
Anyone loading less in the extreme wouldn't heat the tyre so readily, with anyone up against the lifing limits then likely to see more clear safety margin if that load rating is raised / changed.

The upshot being a chassis that previously wore it's tyres quickly would likely see an extension of the lifing from this change.
Where as a a light user may then have difficulty in simply bringing that tyre to its optimum, hence a prolonged warming cycle.

Thoughts?

[Farnborough]

Interested to hear other's view too.

I'm out in "social" mode today and will add more later.

Fortunately there's a live feed where I'm socialising so ill not miss out.

[Farnborough]

There's, additionally, something else that now impacts this whole area of performance.....that's tyre pressure monitoring

Previously one of the tools teams had of manipulation in carcass temperatures and interaction was to shift the starting pressure to target qualli or long run pace characteristics. This effectively now in control of the regulations and monitoring to enforce compliance.

I can see why any tyre manufacturer wants to control this as any failure of structure reflects badly on product. But it has ultimately strangled teams options in this technical performance area. Monitoring far more stringent now, but topic not really spoken about.

The need to provide ultimate performance with much increased kinetic from formula weight rise, along with significantly increased torque output across the whole useable rpm range gives a tyre manufacturer little option in design. The peak of tyre performance may be very high, but with an exceedingly narrow operating bandwidth to hold them within that tight envelope.

Out of that bandwidth and the whole team looks very poor. Singapore would seem to emphasise this more than most other track, as seen in history of performance here for different teams.

It is the reason for having different tracks though, and how a design team aggregates their built in characteristics to perform over a season. Choices do have to be made, nothing is perfect.

Characteristic of MB prevuios successful chassis was tge engineers chasing tyre warmup strategy that gave us DAS, brake magic, finned interior rear rims etc, all trying to cope with this area of tyre performance while delivering a consistency in overall year long achievement, but with drop outs here at this track.
Note:- this is observation that gives modelling to the discussion now, not to criticise in it's intent.