ripper wrote:I personally dislike tyre war because a fundamental part of the car is totally out of your control. If one supplier is much better than others the teams that have chosen that manufacturer will have an advantage given by a right contractual choice. It isn't something you can develop, it's an advantage you have or you haven't.
With one supplier everyone is on the same level and every team can find its own solutions to extract maximum performance from same equipment.
By that logic everything that is generally outsourced on most teams should be all from the same manufacturer for all teams. Brake pads and disks, the rims, the entire PU, fasteners, nuts and bolts, the fuels, lubricants and hydraulic/brake fluids, paint and the big ones that people don't realise, the raw metals that are milled and carbon fibre/Kevlar sheets used to make bodywork, chassis and parts for the car.
All of this is outsourced to outside companies (even if they work closely with them) with maybe the largest teams doing some of these parts themselves such as milling their own fasteners and nuts/bolts.
Part of running a good racing team is who you choose to partner yourself with. Who you have as a partner is sometimes, but not always, far more than a marketing exercise.
We have reached a point where race jouro's are pretty reliably calling teams tyre strategies before the race. If everybody generally knows what everybody else is going to do then the racing gets more boring. In addition to that people are talking about overtaking, the more of a spec series we have the more that different teams will converge on the same solutions. Teams will be running similar strategies at similar speeds, as a result, genuine overtakes (not through DRS or pit stops) is reduced because cars tyres generally degrade at the same rate.
When we have different tyre manufacturers things get a bit more mixed up.
Lastly, F1 wants to tout itself as a sport where technology trickles down to road cars eventually. At present a lot of the opposite is happening. The FIA seems to be obsessed with trying this smoke and mirrors trick of making the trickle down effect to be working yet that can only go so far. If they really want to see a trickle down effect on a tyre level, ya know, what they blab on about, then having multiple manufacturers competing with each other and improving tyre technology is the only way to do it (even if a lot of it doesn't actually apply to road car technology).
