Martin Wahl is one of the Pirelli engineers who on the Thursday morning of each Grand Prix is called to take a lap of the track with “The Doggy”. The little dog, as the curious… tricycle has been nicknamed, has not gone unnoticed since the British GP at Silverstone.
The roughness tester is the new instrument that Pirelli has recently equipped itself with to measure the roughness of the asphalt of the tracks that make up the Formula 1 calendar. he is concerned with making a lap of each track with “The Doggy” following the trajectories that the single-seaters will then travel.
The front tire has been instrumented to allow data on the grip of the track bottom to be collected in a repetitive way.
Roughness is the property of a surface of a body made up of geometric micro imperfections that generally occur in the form of grooves or scratches, of variable shape, depth and direction.
“The Doggy”, therefore, has the task of analyzing the macro and micro asphalt texture. Research has shown that at high speeds the adhesion is reduced less in the case of greater surface macro texture; while at lower speeds the adhesion is favored by a surface with a greater micro-texture.
Martin Wahl with the roughness meter detects the formation of the bituminous conglomerate: at a macro level it measures the distances between one “pebble” and the other and the depth of the grooves that make up the asphalt matrix, while at a micro level it analyzes the individual “pebbles” .
The data collected in the double measurement make it possible to detect what the friction coefficient of the track is, being able to compare the information of one circuit with that other and allowing the construction of a database that can be very useful in the simulation phase, for example when you have to choose a tire for a track where F1 has never raced as it did in Losail and as it will happen for Jeddah.
The Pirelli engineer with “The Doggy” the useful tool for measuring grip
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
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