- Formula One has the
most advanced technology in the biggest budgets in motor sports. So how the heck do they have tires that just flat out stink? Why does the best car in
the world have tires on it that are incapable of
driving from my house to Disneyland, and back? What if I told you that there's an elaborate
global conspiracy to make Formula One tires
worse than they could be, that they're engineered to fail. (indistinct) F1 tire is
planned obsolescence, happening in mere minutes
in front of millions of fans who are powerless to
do anything to stop it. So today, we're gonna find out why formula tires only last 50 miles. You into conspiracy theories? Neither flat earth or friends. Let's go. Well, we here at "Donut," we've had a... Sorry, okay. Good morning, and thanks to Off The Record for sponsoring today's episode. Now, it might come as
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driving record completely. Wow! How do I fight my turducken conundrum? Just go in the link in the description or head on over to offtherecord.com/donut to get 10% off your first ticket. To understand why formula one
tires live such short lives, we need to know how a tire works and what makes a tire stop working. As the only point of contact between a car and the road, a tire's job is to create
grips you can accelerate, brake, and turn. To create grip, a tire's tread needs to be soft enough to squish into and around the tiny peaks and valleys that make up a rough
road surface on a road or a racetrack. And that's true for tread
on your mom's minivan tires, and it's true for the tread on an F1 tire. Now, before you go
(indistinct) comments saying, "Hey, Jerry, "F1 tires, they don't have treads, "they're called slicks." Well, I gotta tell ya, slicks do have tread. Tread is just a layer of rubber that contacts the road surface. And tread is tread, whether it's slick or groovy. Sometimes we use the word
tread when we really mean tread pattern. That's the grooves molded
into the tread on road tires as well as formula one rain tires, which maintain grip by channeling water out of the tread. So the job of every tire is to make grip. But not all the tires are
equally good at their job. A minivan on normal all
season tires can produce about 0.7 G's of cornering
force or lateral grip, and about 0.8 G's of braking force. Now, how different is a
formula one car from a minivan? Well, it's capable of six times that; four and a half G's of lateral grip and five G's of braking grip. That's enough G's to bring tears to your eyes. Literally, the amount of force
will actually draw the tears out of your tear ducts. So how's the tread different
between a minivan tire and an F1 tire? And why does one only lasts 50 miles? A tread on a conventional tire
is made from natural rubber and about a dozen rubber-like
synthetic chemicals with names like styrene-butadiene and halogenated butyl-rubber. Carbon black in extremely
pure form of carbon, is also mixed in to improve the tire strength. And this gives the tire their black color because rubber, if you didn't know, by itself, is white. The tread also includes
antioxidants and antiozonants to prevent deterioration due to oxygen and ozone exposure, further extending the tire's life. Now, tread also includes silica to decrease rolling resistant, increasing fuel economy and reducing wear. So, conventional tire, it can last up to 90,000 miles. And it's the specific chemical makeup or compound of the treads rubber
which makes that possible. So, by fine tuning that compound, a tire manufacturer can determine how long a tire lasts, how soft it is, and at what temperature
it produces maximum grip. Now, the exact formula of
a Formula One tire is kept pretty hush-hush. But to fine tune their performance, the compound includes
more synthetic rubbers and as little as 10% of the natural stuff. This provides increased
strength, heat resistance, and more of consistent grip. Now, in F1 tire, they won't have as many antioxidants and anti-oxidants either, because they don't last long enough for oxygen and ozone deterioration to be a concern. F1 tires would probably
contain less silica because reduce rolling
resistance means reduced grip. I'm saying probably because I don't know the chemical makeup. So your mom, she wants a tire that's comfortable, fuel economical, long-lasting, and provides enough grip to be safe. Now, F1 teams, they only want one thing. And that is the disgusting amount of grip, even if it only lasts for 50 miles. Now, figuring out how to make an F1's tires
massive amount of grip, is currently done by just
one company, Pirelli. Now, they've been the
exclusive manufacturer of Formula One tires for 10 years, but that can change if they don't satisfy certain requirements dictated by the FIA. The FIA, that's the Federation
Internationale de l'Automobile. The shadowy international cabal that runs Formula One. Now, F1 tire contracts
have previously been held by Michelin, Bridgestone and Goodyear. So there's always another company waiting to just slide in and steal all that tire money. There's always another dude who's just waiting in
line to steal your girl. So you gotta watch out. To satisfy those FIA requirements and make sure the tires
can withstand the tortures of an F1 race, Pirelli's tires are under
constant development by 150 engineers at their
R&D facility in Milan. Now, F1 tires are tested at speeds up to 280 miles per, subjected to impact up to 162 miles per, and exposed to track surface temperatures up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, Formula One cars
generate massive downforce, so each tire is load
tested up to 2200 pounds. And every F1 tire is precisely weighed, inspected and X-rayed to look for flaws, unique barcoded for tracking, and 20% of the finished tires are put through destructive testing to ensure they match the
F1's design specification. All that research and testing means formula one tire development and manufacturing cost
billions of dollars. They're so protective of their tires, that if one has a blowout in a race, company employees will
comb the track looking for any pieces that have been left behind, just so other tire manufacturers
can't get their hands on their secret formula. Give me that tire. So if billions are spent
developing Formula One tires, why do they wear out so much faster than your mom's minivan tire? Well, an individual tire's
lifespan is determined by a process called degradation. And, degradation happens two ways. First is tread wear and the second is a term called giving up. For a tire to make the kind
of grip seen in formula one, it's gotta be really soft so it can really sink into the rough road surface. But that grip creates lots of abrasion, particularly, when the car is turning. And even if you're not doing crazy drifts, your car's tires are slipping sideways just a little whenever they're turning. And at the microscopic level, the rough road surface acts like sandpaper and it's constantly removing
small amounts of rubber from the tire. So the more grip your car has, the harder it can turn, but that also means the more slipping and more abrasion scraping
off of your tread. So formula one tires wear much
faster than your mom's tires as a consequence of all
that grip in that abrasion that comes with it. But F1 tires also start off with a lot less tread. A brand new long lasting
consumer tire can have tread as thick as 30 millimeters. And it takes ages to wear that all the way down to the internal structure. A slick Formula One tire's tread can be as little as two or
three millimeters thick. Now, under conditions with
a lot of grip and abrasion, those three millimeters
can go away really quickly, leading to a blowout. Which is exactly what happened in this year's British Grand Prix where five teams had blow
outs from worn tread. Now, this doesn't actually
happen very often. And the reason it happened
at the Silverstone Circuit, comes down to a few factors. Some of them, due to race strategy, but I'm only gonna talk
about the nerdy ones. So first off, the Silverstone Circuit has a lot of high speed corners. Copse Corner, for example, is a long right-hand sweeper taken at over 180 miles per hour, where one tire can be subjected to as much as 2,800 pounds of load. And secondly, F1 tires don't
actually produce less grip just when the tread gets thinner. This means the drivers couldn't tell how worn the tread was, because they still had grip. And before they knew it, they were all out of
tread in lost pressure. It's exactly what happened to race winner, Lewis Hamilton, who crossed the line with one flat tire. But wait, can I hear you
F1 fans out there say, "38 laps of Silverstone. "That's 140 miles, "that's way more than 50 miles." Well, good catch smarty pants. And that's because treadwear
isn't usually the reason for an F1 tire not
making it past 50 miles. That's where giving up comes in. That's when the rubber compound hardens, it can't sink into the
rough road surface anymore to produce grip. Now, with most consumer tires, this really isn't an issue because giving up is caused by repeated rapid heating and cooling, and that doesn't happen under
normal driving conditions, unless, you drive like a boss. When your mom gets into her van, the tire is already soft enough to produce grip, even if it's below freezing outside. And while driving, friction between the tire and
the road will cause the tire to heat up to around
120 degrees Fahrenheit, still well within the temperature range that the tire's compound can create grip. But soft compound tires in Formula One, they don't achieve ideal grip until nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit. And that grip is maintained only until about 240 degrees F. And a hard compound F1
tire doesn't get started until about 230, and we'll work up all the way to 285. Now, that's a pretty
narrow temperature range, and it's why Formula One
tires don't have a lot of grip when they're cold. It's also why teams keep
the tires in heated blankets when they're not on the car. Now, if that soft F1
tire exceeds 240 degrees, it'll start to lose grip and the tread can become too soft, it can't overcome the
abrasion from the track, and it slips too much. And the whole car will start to slide, making it hard to control, which can create a cycle. The too hot tire slips, creating a more friction
which creates more heat, which creates more slipping and more friction, all the way up to about 300 degrees. That's when the tread starts to liquefy, which reduces the
friction and temperature, so the tread resolidifies and forms blisters. So this temperature fluctuation
is called heat cycling, and giving up happens when there's been too much heat cycling to maintain the tire's ability to soften. The natural and synthetic molecules that make up a tire, they're just long chains
of polymers composed of lots of atoms held
together in long strings by lots of chemical bonds. And heating stretches those molecules, which is how the tire gets softer. When it cools, most of the molecular bonds snap back, but some are permanently
broken or deformed. That's called plastic deformation. A normal heat cycling, even without overheating, can cause a tire to harden and become less able to create grip over time. And once a tire can't
soften enough to be safe, it's said to have given up, like me after my first week of my new year's resolutions. Sometimes I say, "Hey, this year, "I'm not gonna eat any sugar." And then, two weeks later, "I'm gonna open up a bakery."
(laughing) F1 tires heat and cool very quickly, and so, they give up very quickly. A Formula One tire that
has worn out in 50 miles, probably hasn't lost all of its tread, it's just probably given up. A tread wear and giving up are part of a tire compound trade-off. When you change the recipe to gain grip, you lose longevity. But with billions of dollars
spent making F1 tires, couldn't they be longer lasting while still making
massive amounts of grips? There's gotta be something
else at play here. Could it be politics? Nah, you can stick around, I'm about to tell you. It turns out that the extra factor at play
is those FIA requirements foreshadowed earlier on. And unfortunately, it's not
really an elaborate conspiracy. The FIA maintains that fast
degradation rates unnecessary to keep formula one exciting for the fans. And the degradation targets they give to manufacturers like Pirelli, are made publicly available. For any race, hard compound is the
baseline for lap times. And FIA wants medium compound tires that are 1.2 seconds a lap
quicker than the hard compound. And, soft tires should be
2.2 seconds a lap quicker than the hard compound. But the FIA also wants a soft compound to exhibit two seconds
of degradation after 10% of the total race distance. So if a race is 50 laps, the soft tire should be
running two seconds slower by the end of the fifth lap
than it was in the first lap. And the same sort of rule applies for medium tires as well. So since FIA (indistinct)
rules require each car to use at least two tire
compounds in every race, teams have to choose a strategy. For example, they could pit once, starting on medium but
switching to hard compound, or they could pit twice using soft tires, then medium tires, then soft tires again. The FIA says that rapid
degradation maximizes the potential number of race strategies to create the greatest variety
in the racing spectacle. So an F1 tire maker like Pirelli
has to engineer compounds that degrade as precisely as possible to those FIA requirements. And that takes some
serious chemical wizardry, and that's why specific formulas for each F1 compound
are so closely guarded. In each season, as F1
cars and courses change, Pirelli has to race to keep up, revising their recipes to stay within the FIA's demands. Pirelli, they currently make
five different F1 compounds for dry conditions creatively called C1 through C5. Pirelli chose three of
the five dry compounds for each race, and each team gets the same tire type. Pirelli chooses based on conditions for that event; the type of asphalt, the corner speeds, the past performance of
Formula tires at that track. But they also had to make sure that the tires chosen wear out fast enough to keep things exciting. So, for example, because of the severe
conditions at Silverstone, they brought the three hardest compounds to the British GP: C1, C2, and C3. It's all the blow outs that happened that turned out to be
a pretty exciting race, but not because of pitch strategy. Every team but one switch
to C1 on lap 12 or 13. Now, it's not easy choosing
the tire for a race, and sometimes, formula one uses a track for the first time. So Pirelli isn't sure what to expect. Now, a lot of people blame Pirelli for what happened at Silverstone. But even though they make and choose the tires for each race, it's not really their decision to make the tires that
wear out artificially fast, that's mandated by the FIA. The Pirelli along with F1
drivers have even pushed back against the FIA's requirements. They worry that the degree
of tire degradation, the FIA is demanding, is dangerously high. And there's no reason why
tire company couldn't develop a tire that would have just as much grip and lasts way longer than 50 miles. I mean, their tires are
used in any car series that lasts 55 or 60 laps. The tires used in the 24
hours of Le Mans are changed only after distances equivalent to two formula one races. Now, the official
statement from the FIA says that rapid degradation is for
the improvement of the show to maximize variety and create drama and spectacle. But these are the world's best drivers, the most advanced cars and the biggest team
budgets in motor sport. Does a variety and pitch
strategy really make the show any better? After all, time in the pits
is time spent not racing. So maybe, it would just be a better show if the FIA just let them race. Where's my Formula One friends at? What do you guys think? Thank you guys so much
for watching this episode of "B2B." Follow me on Instagram, @jeremiahburton, follow us on "Donut," @donut media. If you wanna see some more
behind the scenes stuff that we do here at the new donut shop, hit us up on "Donut Underground." If you go down there next
to the subscribe button, there's a little thing that says, "join." Gram and get a discord, you can come and chat with me. Thank you guys so much for watching. Till next week. Bye for now.
Because F1 wants tyres that degrade and doesn't want tyres that can be pushed hard for a lot of time
Hamilton and Perez beg to differ...
Fans: We need low/non-deg tyres because "we want to see drivers pushing"
FIA/FOM: Yep okay, let's do it then!
Fans then: "Why we have so much boring and predictable races? I missing the time when the midfield was fighting instead of being stuck because the tyres don't deg and so nobody is really winning/losing time".
Serious I just don't get it, we love the 2012 season but we damm ignoring the fact that the tyre difference and deg was one of the key factors why it was so great.
We need tyres with a wider optimal window, not low/non-deg tyres.
As a new F1 fan that fell in love during this incredibly weird season, I found this deep dive into F1 tires very interesting. Some of you may already know the info contained in this episode of Bumper 2 Bumper, but some may not.
Also, I realize their title is not exactly grammatically correct, but as this my first post here, I figured it would be safer to just copy it verbatim.