When you purchase a (road) tyre there are ratings for the tyre on various criteria. The rolling resistance testing is conducted using a steel drum, which is repeatable and reproducible, but not really anything like what happens in real life.PhillipM wrote: ↑21 Apr 2021, 16:11There'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.
Of course it is the case that tyres are tested in the real world also, but the point I wanted to make is that what is actually happening at the interface of the tyre and the pavement is very poorly understood.
Martin Brundle often talks about 'oils' coming out from the surface, which is complete nonsense... nothing comes out from the pavement, unless something awful has happened. What is clear is that for a new surface the aggregate is covered in binder, therefore the tyre is rolling on a film of binder... this is why newly resurfaced tracks are often low grip. After a period the surface layer of binder wears away and the tyre 'sees' the microtexture of the aggregate, so grip levels change as the surface ages.
F1 tyres are not similar to road tyres in most respects, but from the engineering perspective it is important to understand at different length scales, from centimeters to nanometres, how the tyre and the pavement interact. This is not well understood by anyone at present, which is bizarre given how important it is to performance.