At the end of the Qatar Grand Prix Max Verstappen reiterated an aspect that had great importance in the economy of a triumphant season for him: “We design the single-seater with the aim of managing the tires in the best possible way”.
Over the last 15 years, the transition to the single tire regime and the progressive growth of knowledge on the part of the teams has brought tire management into the spotlight. Whether it’s drivers, team principals or technical managers, there is no press conference that ends without at least one question on ‘tyre management’, a blessing and a curse depending on the situation.
Pirelli AV500: here is the high-speed tire testing machine
Photo by: Pirelli
The attention that teams today dedicate to tires is obsessive, and every time the project for a new single-seater starts, one of the first variables in terms of importance is the impact on the tyres. The first verdicts, however, do not come from the pre-season tests, but rather in Milan, specifically in the Bicocca area, at the Pirelli headquarters.
You have to go seven meters underground to closely observe where everything takes shape, an area that sees various high-tech departments bordering laboratories in which the work is carried out by hand with painstaking care. The ‘gouging’ workers, i.e. the manual engraving of the tread on the prototypes, are the work of specialized professionals, who engrave the rubber by hand following the specifications of the prototype. The coveted “wheels” assigned to the pole position scorer on every Formula 1 weekend are also made in this department.
The semi-anechoic Pirelli room in the Bicocca Research Center
Photo by: Pirelli
However, the most sought-after laboratory by Formula 1 teams is the MTS. It is a sophisticated control room that allows you to simulate the behavior of a (real) tire at high speed.
Each Formula 1 team can use this laboratory for a total of 8 hours over the course of a season, and bookings are mostly made in the months of January and February. Pirelli provides all teams with a lot of data relating to the behavior of the tires in its range, but the engineers of each team have reserved the possibility of carrying out ad hoc tests using their parameters, starting from the load on the tire, camber , drift angle, speed and other measurements.
In real time it is possible to check the behavior of the tire, starting from the screen that shows the temperatures (represented with different colors) both in a straight line and when cornering, thanks to the steering angle, and by varying the abrasive paper on which the tire rolls, it is also possible to simulate different types of asphalt. For aerodynamicists, the deformation of the tire is also crucial, since it involves a variation in the height of the single-seater from the ground. In this case, the simulation data is then correlated with the wind tunnel. All tests are confidential, meaning the findings remain known only to the team carrying out the tests and to Pirelli itself.
The teams are obviously interested in the performance aspects, but for the Pirelli technicians the tests go beyond that. There are tests that allow you to verify the behavior of the tires up to 450 km/h, resistance tests which are carried out by varying the pressure, fatigue tests in which a tire can cover a distance much greater than that of a Grand Prix, and other simulations that allow us to obtain crucial data for the decision of a tyre, such as the footprint and operation when the pressure varies.
Mario Isola, head of Pirelli Motorsport, hands over the “rubber” of pole to Max Verstappen
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
“However, the teams are almost exclusively interested in MTS – explained the manager of the Pirelli motorsport program, Mario Isola – a service that we have been offering for a few years to prevent some teams from investing large sums to create a similar system independently. In this way we avoided significant expenses, and at the same time all the teams can use the same technology. It is a service that they appreciate, given that at the end of the year practically no one gives up using all the hours available”.
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