2018-2020 Tyres Thread

[JordanMugen]

Some factoids on Sky F1:

- The test tyres at the 2021 test are made in Turkey, but otherwise identical to standard 2021 tyres.
- The other 13" F1 tyres are made in Hungary.

It seems curious that the tyres aren't proudly made in Italy?

[IanMcNaughton]

I know the new tires are supposed to be slower but for myself, I haven't actually noticed a difference when watching the cars. They still look extremely fast and awesome to watch, which I enjoy seeing. I know that we are going to see the harder compounds on three different weekends so maybe I'll really notice a difference then.

[Juzh]

Some factoids on Sky F1:

- The test tyres at the 2021 test are made in Turkey, but otherwise identical to standard 2021 tyres.
- The other 13" F1 tyres are made in Hungary.

It seems curious that the tyres aren't proudly made in Italy?

I know in the past they were almost always made in turkey, and when they weren't for some events, it was usually known in advance. Interesting they'd be they switching factories on a more permanent basis.

I know the new tires are supposed to be slower but for myself, I haven't actually noticed a difference when watching the cars. They still look extremely fast and awesome to watch, which I enjoy seeing. I know that we are going to see the harder compounds on three different weekends so maybe I'll really notice a difference then.

Must more understeer was very obvious in some corners, primarily T11 and T13 where cars would often simply understeer off the track. That wasn't happening last year even in FP1.

[marcush]

teams use new tools to characterise Pirelli tyres at the track :https://www.megaride.eu/projects/vesevo/
this sounds quite interesting in understanding the viscoelastic characteristics as rhey develop over time and in relation to conditions preparation , how you do your warmup proceedure etc etc .
mind you no team has access to Pirellis tyres away from test and race weekends ,so you need to learn so much from running the product ...its in a way a reverse engineering process as you need to make an educated guess whats best..

[Mikey_s]

Looks interesting, I did some work on samples of discarded rubber (marbles) looking at visco-elastic properties over a range of temperatures. I believe there is a lot of information to be gained in this field that can be used to improve tyre management.
In addition to the temperature and frequency sweeps I also looked at phase transitions and I could see the behaviour that leads to the cool-off lap to rebuild tyre behaviour.
I'd really like to work with a team to develop this knowledge further... especially with the tyres and wheels changing soon... lots of interesting knowledge to be gained.
Mike

[marcush]

I had some really interesting jaw dropping moments in tyre “treatment“
all very basic and seat of the pants stuff
but engineering a “spec “ car can start you think about marginal gains that suddenly translate into eye popping discoveries.
As I still think there are a few races to be won out there with me engineering the car I 'm not going to share the whole story , but I swear it happened :
We had some spec GT type racing series
and a very very low key support by rhe tyre manufacturer , handing out a full size paper for each weekend giving no further information as mandatory cold
pressure for the slick and wet tyre for the weekend .And invariably these cold pressures were the same.
I scratched my head and tried to find out more , phomed a few people and came up with a plan of how to use the tyres allocated for the qualies and races.
Luckily we even had the chance to perform a back to back test as we were testing two weeks before and could try normal against my ideas.
The race was in Misano.The specific Warmup proceedure netted a repeatable
1lap advantage of a full second ! no illegal fluids or treatments nothing outlandish ....luckily our team was a very
lazy horde , so nobody realised how quick our car had been and I had a good
plan to coverup my strategy so nobody
in the team was suspicious or aware of us,doing something different to the rest.
It gave us a front row start when before my “super“driver was a solid midfielder.
Tyres are tricky and most drivers lean too much and too long on them too early
and so never get a chance to get a feel for the true potential as they overdrive.
Thats of course true not for all tyres but some just don't take abuse very well and never come back...

[Mikey_s]

I had some really interesting jaw dropping moments in tyre “treatment“
all very basic and seat of the pants stuff
but engineering a “spec “ car can start you think about marginal gains that suddenly translate into eye popping discoveries.
As I still think there are a few races to be won out there with me engineering the car I 'm not going to share the whole story , but I swear it happened :
We had some spec GT type racing series
and a very very low key support by rhe tyre manufacturer , handing out a full size paper for each weekend giving no further information as mandatory cold
pressure for the slick and wet tyre for the weekend .And invariably these cold pressures were the same.
I scratched my head and tried to find out more , phomed a few people and came up with a plan of how to use the tyres allocated for the qualies and races.
Luckily we even had the chance to perform a back to back test as we were testing two weeks before and could try normal against my ideas.
The race was in Misano.The specific Warmup proceedure netted a repeatable
1lap advantage of a full second ! no illegal fluids or treatments nothing outlandish ....luckily our team was a very
lazy horde , so nobody realised how quick our car had been and I had a good
plan to coverup my strategy so nobody
in the team was suspicious or aware of us,doing something different to the rest.
It gave us a front row start when before my “super“driver was a solid midfielder.
Tyres are tricky and most drivers lean too much and too long on them too early
and so never get a chance to get a feel for the true potential as they overdrive.
Thats of course true not for all tyres but some just don't take abuse very well and never come back...

I'm not at all surprised at your experiences with tyres. My area of expertise is tyre-pavement interaction, and material flow properties. I know that there is time to be gained by better understanding of the tread performance with heat-cycles and phase changes within the tyre compound. This is also definitely a 'known unknown' for the teams, I have had some discussions with several teams - but regrettably not managed to convince them to work with me... yet!
I took a 'marble' from the 2018 German GP and did a few tests looking at the visco-elastic properties over a range of temperatures and frequencies, and also looked at phase changes in the compound... I definitely saw what we see on track that after a 'hot' lap the properties change and that they will come back, but not for some time.
At present the teams are using (surface) temperature as a surrogate for mechanical properties and some of them are better at managing the tyres than others. There is much more information to be gained and I'd love to do some more work, but the teams are so afraid of too much Intellectual Property being outside their direct control that I think they currently prefer to work with their empirical knowledge than have too much information 'outside'.

[PhillipM]

Because they already have the information inside and run incredibly complex tyre modelling on the sims as a result of it, it's probably the most protected bit of model data outside of the wind tunnel. Maybe even then.
Part of the reason Mclaren used to be so fast on a Friday first practice was because it was well known their tyre simulation was incredibly good so they could setup closer straight away, even on new tracks if they had a surface sample.
They don't share it with outsiders.

[marcush]

I had some really interesting jaw dropping moments in tyre “treatment“
all very basic and seat of the pants stuff
but engineering a “spec “ car can start you think about marginal gains that suddenly translate into eye popping discoveries.
As I still think there are a few races to be won out there with me engineering the car I 'm not going to share the whole story , but I swear it happened :
We had some spec GT type racing series
and a very very low key support by rhe tyre manufacturer , handing out a full size paper for each weekend giving no further information as mandatory cold
pressure for the slick and wet tyre for the weekend .And invariably these cold pressures were the same.
I scratched my head and tried to find out more , phomed a few people and came up with a plan of how to use the tyres allocated for the qualies and races.
Luckily we even had the chance to perform a back to back test as we were testing two weeks before and could try normal against my ideas.
The race was in Misano.The specific Warmup proceedure netted a repeatable
1lap advantage of a full second ! no illegal fluids or treatments nothing outlandish ....luckily our team was a very
lazy horde , so nobody realised how quick our car had been and I had a good
plan to coverup my strategy so nobody
in the team was suspicious or aware of us,doing something different to the rest.
It gave us a front row start when before my “super“driver was a solid midfielder.
Tyres are tricky and most drivers lean too much and too long on them too early
and so never get a chance to get a feel for the true potential as they overdrive.
Thats of course true not for all tyres but some just don't take abuse very well and never come back...

I'm not at all surprised at your experiences with tyres. My area of expertise is tyre-pavement interaction, and material flow properties. I know that there is time to be gained by better understanding of the tread performance with heat-cycles and phase changes within the tyre compound. This is also definitely a 'known unknown' for the teams, I have had some discussions with several teams - but regrettably not managed to convince them to work with me... yet!
I took a 'marble' from the 2018 German GP and did a few tests looking at the visco-elastic properties over a range of temperatures and frequencies, and also looked at phase changes in the compound... I definitely saw what we see on track that after a 'hot' lap the properties change and that they will come back, but not for some time.
At present the teams are using (surface) temperature as a surrogate for mechanical properties and some of them are better at managing the tyres than others. There is much more information to be gained and I'd love to do some more work, but the teams are so afraid of too much Intellectual Property being outside their direct control that I think they currently prefer to work with their empirical knowledge than have too much information 'outside'.

top.
THIS exactly reflects my own seat of the pants tyre management .
I always and meticulously kept logs of our tyre allocation , with every info I could get hold of attached to each single tyre .Anslysing those basics really gave
me some good “feel“ for : what was the driver doing out there .what is the cars response and what part plays the ambient condition .
Going racing again I will certainly put even more emphasis in masterin g tyre
use

[Mike_s]

Because they already have the information inside and run incredibly complex tyre modelling on the sims as a result of it, it's probably the most protected bit of model data outside of the wind tunnel. Maybe even then.
Part of the reason Mclaren used to be so fast on a Friday first practice was because it was well known their tyre simulation was incredibly good so they could setup closer straight away, even on new tracks if they had a surface sample.
They don't share it with outsiders.

Somehow managed to lose my login details on my account, so have had to re-register!
Hi Phillip,
I know that the teams spend a lot of time trying to model tyre behaviour. That said, I have had discussions with 4 teams and I can tell you that the level of understanding is not as high as you might imagine, or that they like to think it is. From my discussions I can say that one of the top teams on the grid has, at best, a very limited understanding of the pavement properties, which is at least as important in understanding how the tyre behaves - they were modelling the pavement as an elastic solid - which is reasonable, but far from the whole story. Moreover, from my discussions with the tyre experts in the 4 teams I have spoken to suggests that there are still many areas of uncertainty. For sure they are limited by the regulations from testing the tyres themselves... hence the reason I used a marble, which I would consider as being in the public domain!
Clearly the fact that the marble has fallen off the tyre means that it has undergone some non-linear behaviour, but my results suggest that useful information can be obtained from the materials, certainly I was able to reproduce some of the behaviour seen in practice.
I know that they like to keep the information 'in-house', as this was one of the reasons a team didn't want to work with me... particularly as they were already working with a university on understanding pavement properties... As such, it seemed that they'd rather not know info than have too much outside their direct control. (which doesn't seem to be helping them at present!).
The sector I work in relies on a deep understanding of rheology and engineering properties - there is a lot to learn in this area, not least being able to use actual engineering data, rather than using a surrogate measure (tyre surface temperature).

[Mike_s]

I had some really interesting jaw dropping moments in tyre “treatment“
all very basic and seat of the pants stuff
but engineering a “spec “ car can start you think about marginal gains that suddenly translate into eye popping discoveries.
As I still think there are a few races to be won out there with me engineering the car I 'm not going to share the whole story , but I swear it happened :
We had some spec GT type racing series
and a very very low key support by rhe tyre manufacturer , handing out a full size paper for each weekend giving no further information as mandatory cold
pressure for the slick and wet tyre for the weekend .And invariably these cold pressures were the same.
I scratched my head and tried to find out more , phomed a few people and came up with a plan of how to use the tyres allocated for the qualies and races.
Luckily we even had the chance to perform a back to back test as we were testing two weeks before and could try normal against my ideas.
The race was in Misano.The specific Warmup proceedure netted a repeatable
1lap advantage of a full second ! no illegal fluids or treatments nothing outlandish ....luckily our team was a very
lazy horde , so nobody realised how quick our car had been and I had a good
plan to coverup my strategy so nobody
in the team was suspicious or aware of us,doing something different to the rest.
It gave us a front row start when before my “super“driver was a solid midfielder.
Tyres are tricky and most drivers lean too much and too long on them too early
and so never get a chance to get a feel for the true potential as they overdrive.
Thats of course true not for all tyres but some just don't take abuse very well and never come back...

I'm not at all surprised at your experiences with tyres. My area of expertise is tyre-pavement interaction, and material flow properties. I know that there is time to be gained by better understanding of the tread performance with heat-cycles and phase changes within the tyre compound. This is also definitely a 'known unknown' for the teams, I have had some discussions with several teams - but regrettably not managed to convince them to work with me... yet!
I took a 'marble' from the 2018 German GP and did a few tests looking at the visco-elastic properties over a range of temperatures and frequencies, and also looked at phase changes in the compound... I definitely saw what we see on track that after a 'hot' lap the properties change and that they will come back, but not for some time.
At present the teams are using (surface) temperature as a surrogate for mechanical properties and some of them are better at managing the tyres than others. There is much more information to be gained and I'd love to do some more work, but the teams are so afraid of too much Intellectual Property being outside their direct control that I think they currently prefer to work with their empirical knowledge than have too much information 'outside'.

top.
THIS exactly reflects my own seat of the pants tyre management .
I always and meticulously kept logs of our tyre allocation , with every info I could get hold of attached to each single tyre .Anslysing those basics really gave
me some good “feel“ for : what was the driver doing out there .what is the cars response and what part plays the ambient condition .
Going racing again I will certainly put even more emphasis in masterin g tyre
use

I'd be really interested to chat more on this topic, it gives me a chance to mix what I do for a living with what I enjoy watching when I'm not working!
Understanding the tyre properties, whilst ignoring the pavement surface properties is only looking at half the issue.
Of course, understanding the properties and being able to do anything about them are different things, but having the knowledge is a good first step. I'm guessing that the incipal differences between F1 tyres and those for other racing series would be in the carcass construction rather than the compounds, in any case would be good to chat further.
Mike

[PhillipM]

I'm not sure they really ignore the pavement construction - it's been a thing by teams to take a section or core drilling of the track surface when they're laid new for analysis and modelling for many, many years - it's why they tend to struggle the first day setting up somewhere new or resurfaced that they haven't manage to sample the tarmac at.

[marcush]

Because they already have the information inside and run incredibly complex tyre modelling on the sims as a result of it, it's probably the most protected bit of model data outside of the wind tunnel. Maybe even then.
Part of the reason Mclaren used to be so fast on a Friday first practice was because it was well known their tyre simulation was incredibly good so they could setup closer straight away, even on new tracks if they had a surface sample.
They don't share it with outsiders.

Somehow managed to lose my login details on my account, so have had to re-register!
Hi Phillip,
I know that the teams spend a lot of time trying to model tyre behaviour. That said, I have had discussions with 4 teams and I can tell you that the level of understanding is not as high as you might imagine, or that they like to think it is. From my discussions I can say that one of the top teams on the grid has, at best, a very limited understanding of the pavement properties, which is at least as important in understanding how the tyre behaves - they were modelling the pavement as an elastic solid - which is reasonable, but far from the whole story. Moreover, from my discussions with the tyre experts in the 4 teams I have spoken to suggests that there are still many areas of uncertainty. For sure they are limited by the regulations from testing the tyres themselves... hence the reason I used a marble, which I would consider as being in the public domain!
Clearly the fact that the marble has fallen off the tyre means that it has undergone some non-linear behaviour, but my results suggest that useful information can be obtained from the materials, certainly I was able to reproduce some of the behaviour seen in practice.
I know that they like to keep the information 'in-house', as this was one of the reasons a team didn't want to work with me... particularly as they were already working with a university on understanding pavement properties... As such, it seemed that they'd rather not know info than have too much outside their direct control. (which doesn't seem to be helping them at present!).
The sector I work in relies on a deep understanding of rheology and engineering properties - there is a lot to learn in this area, not least being able to use actual engineering data, rather than using a surrogate measure (tyre surface temperature).

I give that one a nod .
I can confirm that track surface is just as important .The same “trick“ that worked brilliantly in Misano ,did produce nothing tangible in Silverstone .This may explain why some teams excell at certain tracks
you might stumble across some quirky
thing how to handle your tyres in one place but the same of it maybe a completely useless exercise on a different track.

[Mike_s]

I'm not sure they really ignore the pavement construction - it's been a thing by teams to take a section or core drilling of the track surface when they're laid new for analysis and modelling for many, many years - it's why they tend to struggle the first day setting up somewhere new or resurfaced that they haven't manage to sample the tarmac at.

The way in which the tyre and pavement interact is a topic of interest to pavement engineers and tyre manufacturers. However, I can say with certainty (as it is a big part of my work) that typically pavement engineers know very litte about tyres and tyre manufacturers have almost no knowledge of pavement technology - road tyres are currently assessed on a smooth steel drum. This is quite remarkable, given that the interaction between the two is fundamental for safety and performance.
It is not only about macro- or micro-texture, but the way in which the tyre 'envelopes' over the surface.
I chatted with one team about their understanding and they had purchased a laser texture measurement device... but they didn't really know what to do with the data, when I asked why they bought it the answer was that they saw another team with one, so they figured they should have one
I seriously doubt that the circuits would permit coring of the track by teams... repairing a core hole is fraught with problems and the requirements for surface regularity are quite rigorous - moreover, the integrity of the pavement will be damaged and most likely there will be a recurring repair issue as a result. (that said, I have a piece of the Indianapolis F1 circuit on my desk! ... but I know the guys who laid it).
In the real world there is quite some work going on to understand the interation between tyres and the pavement, this is more focused on reducing rolling resistance, whilst maintaining safety, particularly wet-skid resistance)... this is a good technical topic to discuss.
Mike

[PhillipM]

There's definately coring, I've seen pieces of it at Virgin and Mclaren - there's usually a sample area laid out when a track is resurfaced. I know for sure mclaren take samples of the laid down rubber layer as well as marbles every time they go somewhere too.

I don't know who's testing road tyres on a steel drum but given some manufacturers it wouldn't surprise me too much , however road tyres tend to be validated over thousands of hours of actual on vehicle testing over various surfaces anyway.