I'm going to take my shoes off. Everybody. Sorry, it's been a long day and the shoes are coming off. So it's like when mister Rogers takes his jacket off. It's like, my shoes come off. It's time to start.
Happy to be in the booth for once.
Tony Michael, thanks for all the great clips you sent, all the information you sent me in advance of this Tire Ahead recording. But it just occurred to me, I can't remember the last time I changed my tires on my car, and everything seems fine, which got me thinking of all this endless tire talk and more tire talk that we're going to have. Why does an f one and all their data and technological advancement just make tires that hold up better that would be better for the environment as well.
Do that?
Okay, so I think, well, I think a lot of things. But first, just from a safety perspective, you might want to take your car in and have those tires inspected.
For My Heart podcast one on one Studios and Sports Illustrated Studios, this is choosing sides, yes one wow, Wow, Tony. Respectfully, I feel like I already know everything there is to know about tires.
Respectfully, I beg to differ.
Hey Matt, Hey, how's it going?
You know, not too bad? And to convince you otherwise, we have invited to the show some true tire heads. Matt welcome. Who are you for our listeners? Who is who is Matt?
I am Matt Trumpets.
I'm co host of Mister Apex podcast, host of tech Time on Mister Apex, and I am a professional trumpet player who somehow managed to find himself on a podcast about Formula one with a bunch of people from England.
So that's who I am.
And that is Matt playing in the background.
By the way, well it's actually quite lovely.
Any overlap between the trumpet worlds and the Formula one world or are they just two very different worlds?
No colliding needed, There's loads of colliding needed because as a professional musician, as a trumpet player, it performance is what I'm about. And so anytime you look at something like Formula one, you look at the job the drivers do, you look at the job the engineers do, and they're all performing under an unbelievable amount of stress at the very very highest level, and in particular the drivers, and I know what you want to talk about I know you want to talk about tires.
We will get to that.
But when you look at the drivers, yeah, and you look at something like their lap times in a race, and they can be consistent within a couple of tents, lap after lap after lap, and then their engineers will say things like we need you to do something entirely differently but not lose any time, and they'll be within a tenth of what they were doing. The consistency they bring at that level while they're raising other people, it's
just it's astonishing to me. It was really one of the first things that sort of drew me into the sport before I even knew anything about tires or Formula one.
Okay, so what's so special about the F one tires? First of all, what are F one tires? Okay?
So first of all, let's start with this. Tires on their own are unbelievably interesting, and the thing that is most interesting about them, kind of like dark matter, is no one can entirely explain exactly one hundred percent how they work. I mean, the gases have gotten a lot better, there are models out there you can use, but at the end of the day, it's this freakish combination of the kind of material and the different sorts of forces that cause grip to happen, and it just it's too complicated.
No one can model it perfectly, no one understands it all the way, and it is the single biggest driver of performance differences. If you get your tires right, you're talking multiple seconds a lap. If you're an arrow guy and you bring an amazing development, that might be worth a tenth of a lap, But if your tires aren't in the window, that could be seconds a lap that you lose. So their single most important driver performance. No one understands them. And now they're the same for all
the teams. All the teams have to try and get their heads around it and get it right or get it wrong. All your car design, everything is aimed at ringing the absolute best out of those tires, and it's really hard to do because getting back to point A, no one really entirely understands them, even at is zero level. Tires are complicated, and the more you know, the more you can enjoy watching the racing.
Did you also know that some drivers are actually incredibly good quote unquote managing that tires?
I don't what is that how do you manage a tire? You get back in there, let's go roll. Oh see, I love this.
You're going to ask me about tire management, thinking you're going to get an easy, simple answer, and in fact you've just unlocked the most complicated.
Aspect of tires.
But I will try and keep it fairly straightforward and simple. So whenever you drive in a straight line, you're putting stress on your tires. If you're stepping on the gas, you're putting stress on the tires. And what is called a longitudinal direction basically the same direction you're driving, and then when you turn, you're adding a lateral component to that.
And if you think about a tire having a grip level of one hundred for one hundred percent, you have to balance between the two, so you could be thirty percent accelerating seventy percent turning or vice versa. But when you do that, you're adding energy to the tires and that makes them get hotter. And the thing with tires
is they're constructed basically in two pieces. There's the tread, the bed on top that touches the ground, and then there's the carcass, the bit underneath that actually keeps everything together and makes it work. And what you want is for the carcass and the tread to be of a similar temperature. And as that carcass warms up, it gets
more flexible, you get more grip out of it. And so when you go into your turn, whether you're breaking or accelerating, and you're putting that energy in the tire itself, it actually isn't pointed quite the same way as the car, and that's called the slip angle. And the bigger the slip angle, the more energy goes into the tire. And if you make the surface of the tire too hot, you start to have problems with it. So you get things like graining, which you probably have heard people talk about,
where you get this little ripple pattern. It's like having little marbles of rubber on the tire. And so if you overheat the tire when the carcass is too cold, you get graining and suddenly your tire won't go as fast. A great example of this was in the Las Vegas race. You had two drivers same team. You had Auckun and Ghasly,
and Ghasly was having trouble managing his tires. He got graining and eventually fell all the way out of the top ten, and it was little things like he was going into corners in different gears.
I don't get it.
I understand. I kind of have so much regulation I was I boy.
So when I talk about the drivers and their ability to manage things, it's being told things like, Okay, we need you to use a different gear, we need you to lift and coasts, we need you to manage in this corner. And they're not talking about a lot. They're talking about tens, hundreds, thousands of a percent. But they can make literally the difference between finishing fourth or fifth and finishing twelfth if you can do it or if you can't.
I'm intrigued by this. Oh good, because in other sport oftentimes let's let's let's let's let's talk about tennis for a second.
Okay, there's a new one I know.
But the greatest player in the world maybe ever, Novak Djokovic thirty six years old right now. Everyone he's competing with is twenty twenty one, twenty two. One of the things he does best is he utilizes his body and his energy for the longest periods of time. So even if he loses the first set early to a young kid who's You're always like, watch out, dude, there's five
hours left in this guy's tank. And what you're telling me is the best F one drivers manage their tire the same way correct And how do they do that?
It's a learned skill. And yeah, I remember Hamilton back in the day having a year or so where he had to master the new Parali tire. They took him about a year. But yeah, some drivers are much better at sensing what they're doing to the tires, the slip angle, the entry speed, you know how much breaking, what their
take out of the tires. And then you'll hear the engineers be like, okay, push push, push when you get near a pit stop, because then now you don't want any life left on the tires when you get rid of them, but you want them to last as long as you need to for the strategy of your particular race. Am I going to undercut the guy in front of me? Am I protecting against something from behind me? Do I
think there's going to be a safety car? So you see radically different tire strategies, and often they're based on the abilities of the driver. If your driver's bad at managing tires. And by bad, please understand that's an incredibly relative bad. I couldn't do any of this. But if your driver's bad, you might think, Okay, it's better for us to aim for an extra pit stop and let them just really go to town rather than ask them
to do something. They're not great at it, and it's going to make them unhappy, and then there's still not going to be great at it, so the strategy is not going to work anyway, And so that can be sometimes when you see same teams run different strategies with different drivers. Is going to be down to their abilities, and it can.
Change from track to track.
Sometimes travers will have a good week, sometimes they'll have a bad week, depending on on the types turns you have, the type of asphalt you have, what particular compounds.
They've brought to the race. Oh, so many variables. I know they look different, but as it made of the same stuff, is just my road tires. You know what makes them special? Well, they're not even special because they obviously wear down so much faster than my tires.
Well, they look the same, but what makes them different is the quality of the work. To a certain extent, they're all handmade, they're not built on a machine line.
But the real.
Magic though, is on the top. It's the compounds, and there you have your basic rubber, but you have an unknown mix of chemicals added at certain intervals that give it the consistency, the stickiness. So how soft is it, how long does it last? And what you also have n a raised tire often is you often have multiple
compounds and a tread. So, for example, the inside shoulders of the tires will have a harder compound than the outside shoulders, and that's because the tires designed to roll over to that outside when it's taking all the weight of the race car and a turn, so you need it stickier there. But when they go down the streets usually they're angled up a little bit, which is camber, which means that you tend to do the most running
on that mid to inside part of the tire. So they'll have different compounding across a tread, and they'll have different ways of making that compound, which is which is really an art and a magic and where a lot of this performance will come from compounds.
Yeah, what does that mean? A compound?
A compound is the combination of rubber plus the other chemicals that make up the tread of the tire. So in Formula one, they have at every race what they call the soft, the medium, and the hard.
There's always a trade off, there's always for each tire compound, there's a benefit and a trade off as in life.
Ye as in Mario Kart. Now you want the small, little tiny character. He goes faster, but if he gets knocked over, he flies out. Yeah, you know what I mean.
Okay, I like that. I don't do Mario Kart. So that's a good that's a good good knowledge.
Down for us.
So soft tires they wear out much faster, but they allow you to go much faster as well. Copy and you've got the medium, which is middle of rich. It's your reliable tire. It neither goes faster nor does it wear out faster. And then, as you can imagine, there's the hard tire that performs less well but also lasts a lot longer.
So will they start hard finish soft?
It depends on their strategy, also depends on how well they did in qualifying.
Start hard to finish soft. But I just said that, and this is.
Now coming right, and then we're not done because as with all things Formula one, it's a lot more complicated.
They actually have C zero to see five. They have sort of five different compounds, which is a various mix of these tread chemicals that they will use depending upon how damaging the asphalt is and how much energy is being put into the tire. So the more damaging the asphalt, the more energy Usually the harder the construction of tire they will go with. And by harder, it's all relative. None of these would last anywhere near anything you'd put.
On your road car.
And then we're not done because then there's the intermediate, and then is the wet tires for whend it's absolutely throwing it down.
What's intermediates.
That's when you use when it's slightly drizzling.
Oh, for god's sake, it has a slightly drizzling tires, it's raining tire.
That's the blue tie, and that's the green tire.
So the intermediates are the first step you go to when it starts raining and you've lost too much performance
on the slicks. And then if it's a real deluge, then you go to the full wet, which have tread blocks and voids that look a lot like what you see on your road car, and those again are mainly to keep the cars from aqua planing and also to clear what is like a bath hub a second per tire of water from the track, because the real thing that keeps people from racing is if there's too much water on the track, the car's aquaplane then it's unsafe.
And you just got these really long, boring red flag periods. So getting the cars out on the full wets and clearing the track leads to racing again sooner.
Okay, we need to take a quick pause and a quick break, and then we're going to get into the fascinating topic of tire rims.
Wow, we are, We're going to really talk tires.
We're gonna talk times.
Great.
Okay, back from a break, I feel.
Ready to dive into some rims.
They're the same for every car, same design, same material. Interestingly enough, that wasn't always the case. It used to be back in the day that the teams would create their own rims. But similar to what we were talking about in the previous episode, we realize that's actually not where we want the teams to be focusing their time and effort.
I wish every baseball player, I'd use the same beat.
Oh, I love that actually. Okay, so that's the first bit. The second thing is the wheel covers. They're plastic. But here's what's interesting about the wheel covers. Remember that episode where we were talking about sponsors and advertisement. You could have your face potentially on one of the wheel covers that we didn't actually talk about. McClaren have maximized every sponsorship opportunity in placement and they've actually got Google as a sponsor, and so we've got the Google colors on
the rims. The wheel nuts, this is where it gets interesting. They're unique to each team, so every team develops their own wheel nuts. Every will not cost one thousand dollars, meaning that during a race weekend, teams can spend up to fifty thousand dollars justin wheel nuts.
That's a kick in the nuts. It's just funny that it's like, hey, the rims were in charge of the rims. No one else can mess with the rims, but nuts have at it like it's.
The fact that Prairie looks after the rims helps the flow of everything. The wheel nuts, the teams are actually interacting with them as they change the tires. And so if they're creating their own wheel guns and the wheel nuts, it's easier for the team to look after that.
How many nuts are in a wheel? Tell me more about the wheel nuts the wheel nuts.
It's actually a really interesting question because unlike road cars, F one cars have just one wheel nut in the middle, in the center. Again, to facilitate the changing of tires during the pit stop. Here's a guess for you. I had to change a tire on my own. I did like a pit stop challenge with red Ball, and to take off the tire with the gun, put it back on, change it, et cetera. How long do you think that took me?
Well, takes them two seconds. Yeah, so I would say you are twice as bad as them. It's not for any other reason other than you're just a one person. So I would say four seconds. It was very bad.
It was bad fourteen seconds because I mean they're heavy. Fourteen seven. Yeah, the wheels are really heavy, which is but the wheel gun like that was insane. I did not expect to have to put that much pressure and take it off, which just it's nice to do these small exercise you realize, just okay, you guys are doing a pretty solid job. Here.
I'm looking at a wheel nut gun right now, and you know what it looks like. It looks like some Star Wars. Shit. Yeah, it's really insane. And they must all have their own wheel nut gun because they all make their own wheel nuts. But they all must use the same wheel nuts, don't they don't they kind of share. That seems like a lot to all invent your own wheel nut. Okay, so what else? We're not even finished with the tires. The rim wheel covers wheel nut.
Should I continue? Yeah?
Yeah, there's more.
Yeah, FIA sensors. We actually just got off talking. You know, previous episode we talked at length about all the sensors and all the data. There's actually FIA sensors inside of the wheels that measures both the temperature and the pressure of the wheels.
The teams themselves will run infrared sensors look at the tire surfaces and see how they are doing that way. They'll also run aerodynamics sensors because the tires I don't need to tell you, no, wait, I do need to tell you. The tires absolutely have a massive impact on the aerodynamics of the car.
The front wheelwake will absolutely ruin.
Your downforce if you don't manage it, and the rear if the sidewalls are too flexible, as Red Bull learned in twenty thirteen, it will absolutely ruin your diffuser performance and you will be nowhere because you get yes, i'm gonna say it, tire squirt, where the babble of the rear tire going around a turn sends air into your diffuser and keeps it from working correctly.
And then there's something else, which is the barkut that records all the places the tire has been around the paddock if it's been used. It's helpful for both the regulations safety, but it also helps even the commentators to track which tire has been used if it's been used multiple times. There's another thing that you will see, or that you might not see tied to the tires, which is have you ever heard of wheel weights?
No?
Okay, so I'm going to botch this completely, but when these like please do. When Perelli put the tires together and prep all the tires for the teams, they make sure that the tires are properly balanced, because no matter how hard and perfect you try and make the rim and the tire and when you put it together, they might be off center and off balance ever so slightly.
So they have a machine that sensors where it's off balance and it says it's off balanced by a gram or two grams, and so you have these little wheelwights. What's funny with this is the Queen of England used to use the same thing in her dresses so that they wouldn't fly up. And fun fact, two years ago, when I was in the paddock in Austin, I was wearing very bad mistake of short, flowy dress which got
me into trouble a few times with the wind. And so one of my good friends who works at Preddie, was just like, I think, I know exactly how I can help you, and he ended up sticking wheel waits at the bottom of my dress so it wouldn't go anywhere.
Yeah, another contribution of f one's technological advancements to our society, to our society, which of course was stolen by the Queen exact. Okay, well I think let me just offer quick feedback. Yes, a lot is going into tires and let me back it up. It's because the tires actually touched the track. Wow, insightful, Yeah.
Tires for me, are like the biggest paradox in Formula one because it's the one thing that the teams have honestly absolutely no can over, and yet it's the one thing that actually touches the tarmac and the floor. And when I say no control, they can obviously choose which ties they use and when. But other than that, it's all Parelli's doing. And I just think that is pretty paradoxical and pretty interesting.
I invite every listener, yeah, to think about any time they or a loved one of theirs did a physical activity or a competitive activity, the emphasis and the time they spent on their feet and footwear. There you go, it's insane. You want to go hiking, There's a whole thing you got to do for the feet and footwear. If you're a ballerina, if you're a soccer player, tennis players.
I mean, it's like one year Shack didn't even play basketball because he had turf toe feet are touching the field of play and this is times four at three hundred miles an hour or whatever it is.
They go as an ex ballerina. I absolutely love.
That ex ballerina. Yea, and his feet are fucked up.
Oh, Yeah. You know what's interesting also with the paler with ballerinas is they make it look so effortless and clean and easy, and then you realize it's everything but that. And I feel like that's the same with like tire degradation, as you look at it and go, this looks easy.
That you know, the cars look like they're gliding on the tarmac, and then when you look closer you go oh, which I also think is where it's worth like giving praise to the Parreli garage, which honestly is just as busy during a race weekend and every other of the team garages. There's thirty people there that are Prelli tired technicians and experts that are doing everything that they can to make sure they're delivering to each team the best tires possible and imaginable.
Let me stop you right there. You keep mentioning Perrelli. Ye, you keep saying this as if I'm supposed to know what you're talking about. Okay, Prelli. I've just looked at all the teams. There's no Perrelli there. What's Perrelli?
You've got to know who Parrelli is important. It is important. They are important, so Parelli is currently F one's sole tire provider, and they've been the only exclusive tie provider for Formula One since twenty eleven.
They make all of the tires for all of the Formula One teams according to a brief provided to them by the FIA, with input from the teams and Formula One as well, and they will occasionally show up with new tires to be tested after certain races because it's for them, just like the teams, a constant development were to stay on top of the needs as the teams themselves get faster and add more downforce.
What happened before, and you could just drive any tire you want to.
You're back with us at the brick yond the Superspeedway. It was a point out which was completely.
Wild, chaos, confusion rangs.
For those listeners who have never heard of the very sad two thousand and five USA Formula one stop, can you give us a quick story time, a quick debrief? What do we need to know about that?
It's really a pretty simple story. There were two constructors in at the time, one of them was Michelin.
It's easy to see the arguments on both sides from Michelin's point of view, they knew from Friday and those accidents that they had a problem.
When you race at Indianapolis, you run a section of the oval banking. Yeah, and what happened was the Michelin tires, two of them, had already failed on the banking at the speeds the cars were running.
The teams have been told categorically that they cannot go through that final turn thirteen full throttle.
So for the start of the Grand Prix, everybody started out on the formation lap and then all of the Michelin runners.
It comes alongside World Championship leading.
You know, our plan is for the stop straight.
Mike drove into the pits and didn't race, which left five cars on the grid, and it was an embarrassing spectacle for the sport.
Just listen to the crowd there.
Stune where stunned.
And it also was a huge black eye to Formula One in the United States when there was beginning to be a little bubble of interest.
Yeah.
Well, when I arrived at the track this morning, the PA system was playing hit the Road, Jack and don't you come back no more? And I have a feeling that will be the message from Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the American public to Formula one after the fast that we witnessed here today.
The eyeballs of Americans have long been a target for the people running Formula one, and that did not help them at all.
What kind of message is they're sending out to people about Formula.
One only I'm sorry? Right there are the message.
I'm sorry for the public, I'm sorry for the spectator, and sorry for the people at your TV.
I'm sorry.
So that, in essence is what happened.
You think what Formula one has realized because of the paradox that I'm saying, are Formula one it's better to have one tire provider, basically unlike the power units where different teams are competing on power units. And again, like we've talked about, there are certain aspects of the sport where they decide, you know what, having everyone on the same footing, using the same thing makes sense, and there's
other times we're just like we want them. So clearly it's like a tire wall right now, but on the same tires with the same tools, versus let's fight on tires as well.
In the cold, harsh light of reality. The last thing Formula one needs is any kind.
Of a tire war.
And that goes back to the basic fact of tires, which is they are the single biggest performance differentiator you can have. So if I'm Perelli and your Michelin and your Michelin tires aren't good enough, I'm crushing you by laps per race.
And people have complained. I've heard it.
People have complained about how boring this season was, and that's just because one team had better aerodynamics. Imagine if you could add five seconds a lap to Max's performance, how exciting would the season be?
Then?
And you've got your answer right there.
Is it true that one of the biggest mistakes in the history of Formula one was when has tried to use a square shaped tire? What's going on, Michael focus, geez does having these different types of tires? Is this? Is this an exciting part of the sport? But is that fun to like me? Or is that fun to Tony who's a tire nerd? Because I could also see like you just say, look, everybody, everybody's shut up. You get mediums who can drive the fastest.
If you think it's exciting to watch someone three or four seconds behind the leader ten laps from the end, going faster and potentially fast enough to catch them before they get to the end of the race. Then yes, you want this kind of tire strategy. If, on the other hand, you think that's boring and you just want to see F one drivers drive slowly around a track so their tires don't go pop, then what you're asking for is what you want.
Yeah.
No, it's incredibly when they get it right, When the compounds are right and a one stop strategy and a two stop strategy are about the same pace and throwing the odd safety car, it's incredible exciting.
We used to refuel during pit stops. The only thing we now do with pit stops is more or less change the tires. If we took out the pit stops, you are taking out such a crucial element. And the only reason they do the pit stops is to get on different tires. Formula is actually having an issue right now where their cars have become so powerful that they
don't need to be recharged during a race. It used to be in formulate the first I think one or two or three seasons where they would swap cars mid race because they didn't hadn't yet created a battery with a lifespan that could do a full race, So you have these wild pictures of a car coming into jumping, unbuckling, coming out of the car, jumping into another car.
Is what I do with my electric leaf Flower one battery because they're too expensive, so I have to like do half the lawn and then plug it in.
And and then you have to come back.
Yeah, I'm like imagining Michael, your wife waiting for you, like.
With the battery, go go go.
So I just yeah, it's the It adds, but you might appreciate it adds a very human element in sport because the pit stops are twenty people, four people on each wheel, and it's humans excelling for two seconds and doing the best. So it adds that human element where just about anything could go wrong during a pitstop.
Love it any pushback we have on robots controlling everything. I mean, I love a nice human element.
I thought you don't.
You know?
Okay, so I've been doing some googling, yeah, or blinging. I'm not sure who what is it called bing been doing? Particularly have not been binging. I see these little blankets, okay, let's call them. You know what they look like to me. In hockey, when you're not using your skates, you put those guards over the skate. I'm seeing these big, strong alpha men putting little hats and the tires. What's up? What's up with that?
Okay, so they're called tile a protection. No, they're just there to warm so truly, like if you had your teapot and you had your cozy the teapot the only job of the tea company.
We're doing this, but I don't think Americans have that cozy teapot.
I was going to say it's the most British thing.
But I explain this to people who don't know what you're talking about.
The Brits love tea.
Yes, the rise in popularity of tea between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and major social, political, and economic implication.
Not getting into their whole history with the country of Indiana.
Yeah, we're not going that far back. The one thing they love more than a cup of tea is a little pot of tea. Yes, I feel like I've become more British in the extreme.
But I'm asking now because I do love this part of the British.
So they have a pot of tea, and they have like what they call a cozy.
Traditionally made of cloth, the tea cozy insulates a teapot, keeping the contents warm. Their use predates the invention of vacuum flasks as a means of keeping hot liquids hot. The first documented use of a tea cozy in Britain was in eighteen sixty seven. It is probably the Duchess of Bedford who, by establishing the activity of afternoon tea in eighteen forty, would have brought the popularity of the tea cozy during the Victorian era.
Wow, thank you, JOHI. That was actually a valuable contribution. For once. I'm going to pull up a picture of a tea cozy. I'm gonna see what this thing looks like. It's take a little winter hat.
It's a little winter hat that covers the whole teapot.
It's so cute, everybody, if you're not on if you're not blinging it right now, you gotta see these British little winter hats for their teacup teapots. It's very cute. This feels like a rhyme for kids, yes, but that's essentially what I'm seeing on these tires.
And it's exactly that. And you could call them. You've got options here, Michael, so you could call them tire warmers or tire black kids, so you can.
Are they plugged in or anything.
They don't just plug the blankets in. They cycle them up and down and up and down based on what they think will make the tire most perform it when they finally screw it onto the car and send it out of the pit lane.
Oh, not because of the rules, but because of the optimal performance.
Exactly.
They know so much.
So cold tires is the enemy of Formula One. When they line up on the grid ready for the race to begin, they still have everything, the blankets on. When you have, for example, the safety car or virtual safety car, that's when you see the cars weaving like crazy behind the safety car. It's to keep those tires warm.
Warm them up, becauction them exactly called friction. Everybody, look it up.
Look it up. But here's an interesting thing with the tie blankets. There was a plan that in twenty twenty four we were going to get rid of tie blankets altogether.
The only reason to ban the blankets and the warmers is for sustainability reasons. And I've had arguments with my coho about this. But the warmers themselves chew up a lot of electricity, they are heavy, and they have to be shipped all over the world.
This is like a plastic straw situation.
Like you know.
Meanwhile, no one has taken down any of the big oil companies, but I have to not use the plastic straw right right, right right. People will poop poo it.
But it is a significant sustainability step. And it's also what I like to call low hanging fruit. It's not the hardest thing in the world to do. It's a thing that can be done now and will make a measurable difference in terms of the sports overall carbon footprint. But what you have is the teams, just like the drivers. The teams don't like anything they don't control, and they don't like anything to change once they've figured out how to control it. And this is a really big change.
I will say, when it comes to environment and climate change. So many companies, including f one, you know, it's more to them, more important about the actual optics than actually doing it. But there's not going to be any races if we're all on fire, because we're so hot, so maybe we should start taking it seriously.
True, And you know what else is true? There's not going to be a part if we can't sell out. So quick break and we'll be right back. You want to do it together?
Yeah, two three and we're back. What percentage of the team radio conversation is about tires?
Is it a lot?
Everything that's not complaining about another driver's ability to drive their car, it's all about tires. P.
Eighty is very stupping with soft than we have in front of him, album En Riquardo and behind we have a stroll with medium and crane a turn seven, so be careful there.
We'll need you to lift and coast through here. We need a lower apex speed here is so so much of it is just about managing the car, getting the car to perform the way the driver wants so that they can manage the tires.
Some drivers also are very sneaky, knowing that people listen to the team that radio digital Like my there's that running joke with Solwis, Hamilton and Bono his engineers like the big trouble guys, My tires are giving up and everyone's like, you just did the fastest lap what are you saying? Your tire? And so there's this whole conspiracy that every time that Lewis said my tires are giving up, they're just like he's a peak tire performance. That's what's
happening right now behind He's on my ass. You don't say that some cars are notoriously harder quote unquote on the tires.
Guess which which cars are really bad at preserving their tires?
Don't say ferrari. I wish I could go back and change everything. Oh dear, all right, So every team uses the same tires. That's something I think I have to emphasize, right, Everyone gets the same tire, correct? Can they go through as many of them as they want? No, you only get so many of the same tire. It's like everyone gets their ration.
Yes, that's a great way of putting it.
They get thirteen sets of tires over the weekend, six four and three, so you get six offts, four mediums and three cards. So you have to manage those because you need to run them to know how your car is working on track. But you also want fresh tires for your race, especially for the qualifying, So which tires you use in practice? Those tires give you data. Data is super useful to teams, but once you've used that set,
then they are not useful to you. And then after every practice session and after qualifying, you have to return some of those tires.
There's a couple of additional rules, such as every driver has to use at least two different types of compound during a race, which again as to that strategic element. So that's also part of the pit stop, like you're gonna have. Even if that wasn't a rule, teams have to do the pit stop. They also have to change compounds.
Do they have to pit Yes. It blows my mind that they will reuse a tire. It's like looking through the bag for you know, something that's still available?
What else is anywhere Mary Poppins on her bag. You're just like, I'm sure there's something at.
The bottom can help us.
Yeah, but you bring up a great, great question or a great nuance, which is you can reuse them over the space of a weekend. But after that weekend, each team will bring their tires back to the Paradie garage, back to the Pretti station. Their whole job is basically to take all the tires off, the rims, clean the rims, X rayder rims and send the rims back to the teams.
X ray the rims, X rayder rims.
They have a look at if there's any degradation, what happened to them? Tie all of that stuff, and then they take all of the tires. They're gonna get basically destroyed, whether they've been used or not, except for the intermediate tires and the wet tires. Those if they haven't been used, the teams get to keep them, but in the slick tires, so those three compounds do not get used ever again,
even if they weren't used during the race weekend. So if a driver crashes in lap one and he didn't use any of their tires, those get destroyed and we used funnily enough or fun fact, they.
Get sent back to the factory. They get dissected, taken apart and analyzed, and they get run through a shredder and recycled into various projects.
That sounds like that that doesn't really happen. I don't think that really happens. I think they say that as a nice headline.
I think it kind of makes sense.
I mean, maybe a little bit, but there's no way destroying eight sets of brand new tires, is gonna like recycle itself back to okayness in the environment.
Solid point.
Then I hear them talking about scrubbed tires, Yeah, what's that.
They generally scrub the tires. They have a little equipment tool and you actually see videos that some people call ASMR very satisfying videos where you will see them actually scraping what's on top of the tire. There's a reason that the tires pick up a lot of things on the racetrack, and there's two reasons for that. You might often hear commentators at the end of a race saying,
pick up the marbles. Pick up the marbles. What they mean by that is all the little pieces of rubber degradiation that sits on the side of the track at the end of the race. If the car feels too light, they will pick up as much tire rubber aspects that have fallen off the tires to add weight to the tires so that when the car gets weighed at the end of the race, it is as heavy as it needs to because there's a minimum weight restriction with these
cars and the drivers insane. So if you pick up all the marbles.
Drive over more stuff, so the car weighs more.
So the car weighs more, which then if you're planning on using that tire again, then it needs to be cleaned. But they also clean and scrub the tires at the end, because again there's data to get picked up of that. It's useful information. It's learning how the tires have degregated over time. Like, there's all of that aspect that comes into it.
So I was just, uh, I was just fact checking Tony's claim about scrubbing tires creating an as MR sensation.
Uh.
And I just love to get your feedback. I'm gonna I'm gonna play you a little something.
Is that all right? I hope I don't go from soft to hard? All right?
Tell me, tell me if you can hear this and if it's h A S m R and you.
This is a scrub being scrubbed.
I think it's more visual pleasing exercise.
That's not a good as MR. I'll show you a guy on TikTok that chops carrots with a SMR and I'm like, oh carrots, yeah.
H h.
So Michael, final thoughts. I know you were somewhat excited coming into this episode. Ah, you fashioning yourself a tire ahead. Have I put you off?
No, You've not put me off, Tony. If anything, You've put me on to tires, and I could see this is cool, This is cool. The managing of the tire is a very important task. And it may not snap me out of bed in the morning when it comes to F one, but I think this is a really integral part and I find it interesting and without a doubt. I need to get some slick Pirelli tires on my family Volvo.
Huh, yeah, that's gonna great, look for.
You know what I want in my life? Tell me I want my life to be one of those well managed tires on a championship car. Okay, A lot of people right now don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but I know I want to manage it well. I don't want to just be like, oh, fifth, I'm in my fifties, life is over. No, no, no, we still got some good tires left it. You know, sixties still
got a good tires left. Maybe my twenties I didn't go as fast as I need to do because but my seventies I'm kicking ass right now, do you get it?
I actually really like that. It's like you want to use everything up and get to the end.
And you'll still be spraying the non champagne fizzy white wine. So I think tire episode was cool, and I wonder how many podcasts in the Internet even devoted entire episode two tires.
They're probably whole podcasts devoted to F one tires.
Cold Tires would be a good name too. It's funny to think of like Caveman inventing wheel and now where we're at with these tires that you know humanity as wild man.
This has been Choosing Science f one, a production of Sports Illustrated Studios, iHeart Podcast and one oh one Studio podcast. The show is hosted by Michael Costa and Tony Cowan Brown. This episode was edited, scored, and sound designed by Senior producer Jojai May Thaddle. Scott Stone is the executive producer and head of audio, and Daniel Wexman is Director of podcast Development and production Manager at one O one Studios.
At iHeart Podcasts, Sean Titne is our executive producer. And a special thank you to Michelle Newman, David Glasser, and David Hootkin from one oh one Studios. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, go visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And whatever you do, don't forget to rate us and tell your friends it really does mean a lot.
Tony. What do we have next week?
Next week on Choosing Sides one, we're going to talk about the logistition. So there's a lot of focus in F one that goes into the drivers, the speed, the money, the glitz, the glamour, the tires. Yes, and the tires all true, all good or well. But to me, one of the true marvels of this sport, and I say this dead series is its logistics. These are the true
unsung heroes of this sports. It's the F one operations and logistical managers or logistics managers on the teams, but also with their partners like the HL.
So we're going to devote an episode to the legit stics of F one.
Yes, the traveling circus, how they get from point eight to b and they do it twenty three times a year and without fail, every single component arise on time.
That's wild.
If you thought the tire conversation was interesting, yeah, wait until we hear about the logistics of the sport
Waiting for you,