F1 Fanatic

Sam Michael recommends a ‘heavy duty’ wet tyre for the rare occasion when you have conditions like we had in Japan on Saturday.

He feels watching boats sail down the pit lane is good for all of 30 seconds, but not an hour. I’m inclined to agree.

Seems like a good suggestion, although one wonders what the amount of water 10-12mm of tread would look like whilst it was bucketing down. I can’t imagine you’d be able to see your hands when following another car let alone much of the track.

Sam says ‘at least it would be something’

link : http://www.itv-f1.com/news_article.aspx?id=49414

Is it worth it though? We have really horrendous weather about as often as HRT performs well so I’m not sure it’s worth it. How much would it cost to develop the tyre? It would be nice to have it just as a back up but when the weather is terrible usually the light is too which is a massive problem.

I imagine cost is a big deal with monsoon tyres. Am trying to get something from Pirelli on it to form the basis of an article.

The problem is that, the full-wets already have a very effective way of getting the water away from under the tyre. With a car that weighs 625 kg there is nothing to do to help traction from slow corners like the hairpin at Suzuka. You simply cannot make a tyre that can cope with that amount of water. It is simply impossible, I read an article the other day on either f1technical.net or f1.com, where Bernd Maylander even said that he had problems controlling the Mercedes SLS during FP3. If a car that ways 2 tonnes cant even get grip, how on earth do you expect a Formula 1 car to get it?

Maybe the boat manufacturers should make a paddle tyre for monsoons :)

Thinner wheels and tyres would be one way, but I can’t imagine that would ever work in terms of the rims fitting over the existing hubs without massive changes.