wesley123 wrote:Artur Craft wrote:
About "Red Bull having the most df but being jeopardized by the Pirellis", I wouldn't trust that claim that Pirelli have access to all teams telemetry and data and, therefore, knows RB have the most df.
So how else is Pirelli going to make suitable tires that will last on every car(which they dont btw but that's a whole other story)?
They need that data to make the suitable tires, else it will be all guesstimates and they'll get it wrong major time at some point in a season, if not at the start already.
You need to have a big difference in what you expect and what is the max load on the tires. The figure of 20% is mentioned on the article. In F1, downforce fluctuates much less due to tight regulations.
Maybe not even Marussia/Caterham have less than 20% than top downforce car.
Pirelli doesn't need to know the exact downforce figures of the F1 cars to provide suitable tires to all of them. They just need to know the rough level of df of this current generation of cars and design tires with a large enough window to cover it
Example: Let's suppose Pirelli was told that the downforce level(at top speed) of the cars was around 1800Kgf and let's suppose with a big load transfer that one of the rear tires could have 45% of that load when cornering at very high speed(a la Copse). So, Pirelli would know that a single tire would need to withstand at least 1100kgf eventually(df+car weight+load transfer in this example).
Obviously, it's recommendable to design tires with a enough margin to it, so they could very well design a tire to cope with 2500kgf and be very well safe with it. No need to know exact and specific figures of every single car