I read a lot of discussion about which car is good in cold/hot, or how this track has a high track temp or ambient temp. My question is why does a change of a few degrees in the environment (be it track or air temp) affect these systems in the cars that are operating at hundreds of degrees. When a brake is 900C why does it make a big difference if the air cooling it is 12C or 18C. They are both a heck of a lot cooler than 900...
As far as I could tell this is not related to in-car systems but mostly to the incredibly narrow temperature window of the tyres, where even a cloud or two over the track may cause it to go below the optimal range and start graining, or the opposite a few degrees up may cause overheating and blistering.
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It's quite simple: If the tire is delivering peak grip in the, say, 90-100 C window, a change of 10 C in track surface temp, and thus in tire temp, will throw the tire temp out of the optimum temperature range. Hence you will lose grip, and grip is everything.
The answers with regard to the tyres are all correct. If there is a system or component that massively affects the performance and relies on a small temperature operating window you expect to see that kind of reaction. It is the amplifying factor the component has on performance. If you take the brake temperature it is mainly affected by the amount of air that is forced through the brake ducts and not so much by the air temperature. So the system is having a small sensitivity to air temperature but a large one to air flow.
Ultimately the teams are mostly fighting to get their suspension and downforce arrangements right for the new set of Pirelli rubbers. Once they have adapted to the new rubber they will have consistent results. Same as last year. The question many people are having this season is if the need to manage tyres overshadows any other aspect of motor racing strategies. The situation is so much on the edge that the gain on unpredictability is chewed up by the certainty that you will not be able to race each other any more in most cases because the window is too small. Not only can you miss the operating window, you will also mess up your tyres with marbles if you go off line and fight. That is going to slow you down so much that any conservation or gain of track position becomes insignificant compared to the lap time loss.
IMO the tyre situation has gone over the top. We need more durable tyres with less marbles on track. If that leads to fewer pit stops I would not mind at all. The current situation is not a good one.
Formula One's fundamental ethos is about success coming to those with the most ingenious engineering and best ..............................organization, not to those with the biggest budget. (Dave Richards)
At the height off the tyre war between Michelin and Bridgestone there were similar issues. But generally we have not seen such issues before, because single tyre suppliers have always stayed away from edgy design. Pirelli deliberately did this in order to generate tyre talk. Marketig wise one could say that they have been quite successful with this strategy.
Formula One's fundamental ethos is about success coming to those with the most ingenious engineering and best ..............................organization, not to those with the biggest budget. (Dave Richards)
track surface is of course influenced a lot by sunrays at least on the daytime races .The track surface would without sunlight influence follow slowly the ambient temp wwith a considerable delay .
Also thermodynamics is very weird as the heat flow drastically slowed down when the two bodies get near the same temperature..so if your delat t decreases cooling is reduced and needs forced convection or something like phase change to perform (latency storage for example -not sure if that was allowed in Formula 1)
WhiteBlue wrote:At the height off the tyre war between Michelin and Bridgestone there were similar issues. But generally we have not seen such issues before, because single tyre suppliers have always stayed away from edgy design. Pirelli deliberately did this in order to generate tyre talk. Marketig wise one could say that they have been quite successful with this strategy.
But wouldn’t favorable tire talk be preferable for Pirelli?
