Hey folks. On episode 28 of "The Flying Lap" (Peter Windsor's new weekly webcast) Paul Hembery was a guest. I'm not sure how many of you follow this show though. I made a point to ask about downforce vs the Pirellis, as it seemed last year that (for the most part) the tyres could handle getting more downforce, but in low-grip, low downforce conditions could grain more than the Pirellis, while this year it seemed there was less graining, but more wear and degradation, and it seemed that more downforce was in fact bad for the tyres.
Paul's reply (though I can't remember the exact wording) was that with his Pzero F1 tyres, you had to be very delicate with it. I believe, though, it was something to the effect of "Too little downforce, and you still would grain, and can't switch the tyres on, and you'd grain/overheat them through tyre slip and over/understeer. Too much and you'll overwork and overload the tyres."
This kind of implies a relatively narrow sweet spot in terms of the working window of the tyres with regard to downforce. Efficiency in terms of how much drag a car has, however, wouldn't, I believe, affect the tyres.
I wonder if this would mean a disadvantage to someone like Adrian Newey, whose primary mission when developing a car, it seems, is not suspension (in terms of car ride/traction, slow speed grip etc) but adding every single point of downforce that he could.
What do you all think? I think it could be that Newey is maybe putting too much downforce on at high downforce tracks like Catalunya, and I think most of us saw how Seb seemed to be struggling as if he was on old tyres at the end - could it be that his downforce overloaded the tyres and killed them quite early? Though in Monaco his tyre preservation was quite supreme, so that can't be the case at most circuits.
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