Tyre Supplier Wanted for F1

Tenders are invited for supply of tyres to high tech automotive company.

Previous inscrutable supplier of past 13 years, exclusive supplier past three, willing to pass on tales of heartaches and drama to successful tenderer at the conclusion of the 2010 season.

Apply – if you’re rich, resourceful, and only slightly demented – to:

Bernie Egglestone PLC -F1 cars Division

(Bridgestone Firestone have announced that they are relinquishing their role as the only tyre supplier to Formula 1 Racing at the end of the 2010 season.)

P.S. The ad is a spoof.

Here’s the plug! Stuckey Tyre Service

Stuckey Tyre Service is one of Australia’s premier suppliers of car tyres, whether for vintage or motorsport application, or everyday road use. We supply all the major premium tyres. Our sales office and warehouse are located at 828 Sydney Road Brunswick, Australia.

Servicing the demands of Australia’s leading motor racing teams has provided us with unrivalled knowledge of the best performance tyre and wheel combination for every application, road or track. From the most exotic European sports car to the average family sedan, we at Stuckey Tyre Service have a carefully selected range of tyres and alloy wheels to enhance the road performance, safety and appearance of your car.

At Stuckey Tyre Service you can take advantage of the ultimate precision fitting and balancing service where the utmost care is taken with your valuable tyre and wheel purchase. In particular we take great pride in being able to balance a wide variety of specialty wheels including wire wheels for historic applications. The most advanced fitting and balancing equipment is used by skilled technicians whose work is trusted by Australia’s top race drivers at speeds over 300Kpm.

We at CarbonBlack love sending customers to the Stuckey team.

Tyre Tread Compounds

There’s a great deal of confusion amongst car enthusiasts, particularly the “rubber burners”, on tyre tread compounds and their make-up. One enthusiast on a car blog announced that tyres weren’t made from rubber at all, but from oil. You know what- he was mostly right!

Oils ain’t oils, and rubber ain’t rubber any more.

Tyres contain 3 or 4 different rubbery materials. One is natural rubber; which is the juice of a tree, which is coagulated using acetic acid, smoked and dried. The others are all made from oil, and are called “polymers”- another term is “long chain macromolecules” but don’t worry too much about that. It is now possible to make “natural rubber’ from oil too, but it’s cheaper to let the tree do it.

These various rubbers can be mixed together in different ratios in giant blenders to make a compound. At the same time, other important ingredients are added to make the resultant product tougher and stronger. A typical tyre compound may contain 10- 14 ingredients, all added for a specific reason. The most important of these is carbon black, of which there are many types.

A tyre typically has 7 to 11 compounds, each doing a specific job, be it encasing the bead wires, keeping the air in a tubeless tyre, flexing the sidewall, sticking the layers of nylon or polyester together, and so on. But there is only one compound that hits the road where it all happens, and that’s the tread compound.

This is basically the only criterion on which the motorist can judge the performance of the tyre, so it receives the most comment from car enthusiasts. The tyre engineer and chemist can vary the compound formula to maximise/minimise any tyre characteristic that he requires.

A typical passenger tyre tread compound contains as the base polymer styrene-butadiene copolymer, around 35% carbon black to reinforce it, and maybe some silica. These increase the abrasion resistance, tear strength, and cut resistance. Without them, the tyre would go gooey, and wear out very rapidly. Remember those old crepe rubber soled shoes?

Vulcanisation chemicals such as sulphur, zinc oxide, stearic acid, and accelerators make up 3-5%; antioxidants and antiozidants to stop it perishing or cracking, processing aids such as oil, resins, tackifiers to aid in the lay-up of the assembly are all incorporated.

Some tyres have two tread compounds- either side by side (very rare), or a cooler running undertread compound under a harder, hotter running cap stock. Most, however, only have one compound in the tread area.

The rubber used in tyres is normally a copolymer ( mixed and then polymerised together) of 23% styrene, and 77% butadiene. However, this ratio is not set in concrete, and specialty rubbers of different proportions of these two refinery products can be made. For example, “cling rubber”, which was widely touted for its improved wet grip, is 40% styrene, 60% butadiene. The resulting rubber ran hotter, and wore out quickly under Australian conditions. A 90% styrene, 10% butadiene rubber is used to make floor tiles, not car tyres.

Another rubber developed for use in tyres is polybutadiene. Butadiene is the most common feedstock from a refinery. However the resultant polymer suffers one big disadvantage- its wet grip is poor. Its big advantages are however, that it stands up to extreme abrasion much better than other rubbers, and runs cooler. Back in the days when the Armstrong 500 Miler was run at Phillip Island on standard tyres and rims, and the track was not a smooth hot mix like it is today, Harry Firth won the race by changing only one tyre, whilst everyone else changed at least twelve on the very abrasive track. But he lost 3 seconds a lap, because down on the ocean side, the tyres wouldn’t grip to racing levels. The tyres were made from a high proportion of polybutadiene in the tread, specially airfreighted out for the race.

We’re not as skilful as Harry Firth was then, and the Australian motorist puts “grip in the wet” as the top desirable characteristic from his tyres, so its use is now mainly confined to truck tyres in blends with natural rubber, where heat is the main enemy of tyre performance.

So ultimately, it’s the “grip” of the tread compound that drives, steers, and brakes the car, through the contact patch, around the area of a size 12 shoe. It does this by slipping! Sliding generates friction, and this causes things to happen. All tyres slip, particularly driven and steering tyres, which is why they wear out. No friction- no progress. Try driving and steering on black ice sometime to see what I mean.

“Rubber burners” overlay this with “sticky friction” by heating the tread surface till it starts to revert- goes gooey. Lots of smoke! On top of this, tyres generate heat internally from the stresses generated by flexing (the hysteresis loop). As the rubber warms up, the rubber changes its grip characteristics, provided that the compound hasn’t degraded to the gooey stage (“goes off”). This occurs generally in the thickest part of the tyre under the greatest load, like the outside shoulder of a tyre being driven on a banked circuit. That’s why you see tyre technicians who are evaluating tyres, drive a thermocouple needle into the shoulder of the tyre tread- the thickest part. The electric blankets on the wheels ready for a change onto a race car are there for the same reason- so that the car will handle similarly to the old, warmed up tyres.

The position of the white stripes in the tread grooves of the Formula 1 cars indicates the type of compound used in the tread. The tread grooves are there to slow the cars down, even when the road is dry. Race team managers under F1 Rules have to use at least two types of tyre during the course of the race. This adds another source of tactical variation for managers to consider, as though they haven’t got enough on their plate. But the race result may have been decided in a tyre development laboratory in Kobe or Luxemburg or wherever, since so much data has been accumulated on the vagaries of each circuit, and the tyre compound that performs best on that circuit.

It’s almost time for the Melbourne Grand Prix- so enjoy your viewing

Pirelli Scorpion ATR Named Year’s Best

Pirelli’s Scorpion ATR has been named the best performing All-Terrain tyre by the highly respected Consumer Reports.

Following on from its earlier success in the European summer tyre tests, ConsumerReports.org rated the Scorpion highest among all tyres tested, based primarily on impressive grip in both dry and wet conditions, excellent dry braking and hydroplaning resistance.

The superior performance in the Consumer Repoarts.org test reinforces the German motoring magazine Auto Bild Allrad finding who also determined the Scorpion ATR to be the leader in its class, stating “Pirelli gets the highest average score for off-road tyres’ quality, demonstrating a very good off-road grip, relative low noise, and street performance with good handling characteristics”.

To achieve this result, Pirelli’s engineers focused their attention on the tread design. The biggest challenge was to maintain the durable all-terrain qualities while at the same time achieving low rolling noise levels. The solution was to integrate into the basic design a new concept of “sweeping” curved grooves. With a strong character derived from its aggressive tread pattern, together with various options for sidewall lettering, Scorpion ATR adds much to the personality of the vehicle on which it is mounted, and in true Pirelli style, with unmatched performance.

Three-times Bathurst V8 Supercar champion Craig Lowndes recently fit Pirelli Scorpion ATR tyres to his Ford Ranger and was instantly impressed.

“The quiet-running, symmetric tread pattern makes driving around town a breeze,” Craig said.

“And because of the shoulder and interlocked tread blocks, when I get off the track up at the farm I still have plenty of directional stability, steering response and off-road traction,” he added.

“Apart from the performance aspects of the Scorpion, they look pretty good too!” Craig beamed.

Consumers Union (CU), the publisher of Consumer Reports.org, is an expert, independent, non-profit organisation whose mission is to work for a fair, just, and safe marketplace for all consumers and to empower consumers to protect themselves. The organisation was founded in l936 when advertising first flooded the mass media. Consumers lacked a reliable source of information they could depend on to help them distinguish hype from fact and good products from bad ones. Since then CU has filled that vacuum with a broad range of consumer information. To maintain its independence and impartiality, CU accepts no outside advertising and no free samples and employs several hundred technical experts to buy and test the products its evaluates.

Ferrari fantasties come true

Want to drive a Ferrrari?

Well, at Supercar Life in the States you can drive a Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo, Aston Martin DB9, Mercedes CLK63 AMG Black Series and a Porsche Turbo 997 for a mere US $5000 a day. That lets you have  eight laps around the twisting, 3.6 km course in five luxury cars. Four laps are in the passenger seat while a professional driver maneuvers the course, but four others are at the wheel, chasing the instructor in an identical car.

The customers? – the wealthy, thrill seekers and those who want to drive expensive cars on a racetrack –mostly are men between 35 to 65 years old.

Our Experts on: Hot Tyres and the Grand Prix

Our tyre experts are a bit motorsport mad over here at CarbonBlack, so they’re currently quite engaged in the Melbourne Grand Prix. This year, the high temperatures generated trackside at Melbourne during the first 2008 Formula 1 Grand Prix brought quite a bit of comment about “Tyre Grain” and its effect on tyre adhesion. Here’s one of our tyre experts, David Matthews:

During a race tyres generate heat, mostly within their interior. The most heat is produced when the tyre is new, and gradually declines as the tyre wears away its rubber tread and settles in, the latter happening very quickly at formula 1 speeds. But the heat generated in the tyre can’t get away quickly when the road is a hot 52 degrees, and the ambient temperature is in the high thirties as it was in Melbourne.

The tyre surface rubber undergoes a chemical change called “reversion’, the physical state changes, it becomes less resilient, and “goes gooey” on the surface, and in the tread rubber interior as well. Under the high slip which the car generates at extraordinarily high cornering, acceleration and braking forces, the degraded surface rolls up into little balls of rubber. The fact that it is now the driver controlling these forces, instead of a “you beaut” computer, probably accentuates this because of driver variations in technique.

The cars are very light, the tyres do not deflect much, which helps to keep them running cool. The lack of deflection also diminishes the effect of the “standing wave” which is extraordinarily destructive on tyre casings. Basically, this is caused by the tyre not having sufficient time to recover its shape away from the road contact patch, before it’s back on the road again!

As the tyre wears, there is less reversion of the rubber because the interior of the tyre tread is not generating as much heat (because it has worn away), and the ‘gooey balls” may disappear, and lap times improve.

Reminds me of the old jingle, now paraphrased a little to read:-
“The tyres drove on the burning road
Going round and round like mad
Rolling it up in sticky balls.
Driver says “that’s bad””.

As for last year, the rules now state that drivers must use tyres of different compounds for at least part of the race, such variations being discernible from the white stripes painted in the tyre tread grooves. If you want to know more about the difference between “hard” and “soft” compounds, go to “all about tyres” formula 1 at www.carbonblack.com.au.

Most teams ran “hard” tyres for as long as they could because they run cooler under the conditions experienced. The rule was introduced to give team managers yet another tactical variable to control to get the best result for their car, for a particular track and conditions.

What is significant is that I did not see a tyre failure on any car during the race. Take a bow, tyre engineers!

V8 Supercars stick with Dunlop until 2012

Dunlop has beaten rival manufacturers to win its third consecutive contract to supply the control tyre to teams participating in the Australian V8 Supercar Championship Series from 2008-2012.

Dunlop’s V8 Operations Manager Kevin Fitzsimons believes the quality of Dunlop’s tyre was the key factor for Dunlop winning the contract.

Dunlop’s control tyre, with just 4mm of tread and a contact patch of 80mm, is designed and tested to control a 1.5 tonne V8 Supercar capable of 620 horsepower at 7,500 rpm with a top speed of 295km per hour in temperature of up to 120°C.

The Dunlop V8 Supercar control tyre is manufactured at the company’s specialised racing tyre factory in Nagoya, Japan, where each tyre takes more than three hours to be hand-crafted.

But in a sport where technology and competition is everything – there has been no change to the tyres compound or structure since Dunlop took over the contract from Bridgestone in 2002.

The cars by regulation are equal which makes it hard to pass.  There have been numerous discussions with Dunlop and the technical board on the subject of how to improve close exciting racing and increase passing during the race.

Suggestion of two tyres, a soft and a hard compound have been dismissed as has the talk of changing to 18inch rims.  Kevin Fitzsimons claims there will be no change to the rim size staying at 17×11 inch until after 2012.

The tyre has a reputation of being reliable, safe and providing exceptional performance at every track and this is what the teams and drivers have raved about.

Kelvin O’Reilly, the general manager of TEGA, which represents the V8 Supercar teams, said: “The V8 Supercar tyre supplied by Dunlop is required to operate at maximum efficiency in the widest of racing environments. Whether it be hot or cold conditions, high speed or tight circuits, the Dunlop tyre has been excellent for our competition use.”

I guess this is a good argument for the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it mentality.

V8 Supercars at Eastern Creek

CarbonBlack’s founder and Managing Director Jodi Stanton and Sunrise Sports Anchor Mark Beretta in the pits at the V8 Supercar race at Eastern Creek.

Mark Skaife and a fan after a successful race on Monday

CarbonBlack’s Leisa Emberson and Jodi Stanton learn from the V8 expert Brian Lawrence of Stone Brothers Racing.

Channel 7

Extended Track Width

One of the limitations placed on modifying a vehicle’s suspension, is restricting the increase in track width to one inch (25.4 mm, so some States say 26 mm., some 25). They would, wouldn’t they! Can’t even agree on how to round out metric conversions.

So I’d better define track width first. It’s the measured distance from the centreline of the crown of one tyre, across the vehicle to the centreline of the other on the opposite side.
So why do they bother? As part of the program to discourage such modifications, State legislation prohibits tyres extending past the width of the body-work (though you can buy mudguard flares). Even with those, you might still get knocked back because of the fall-back position, which is to also legislate for track width limitations.

There is a sound reason for the limitation. The wheel is supported by two bearings on the axle. The inner bearing is load bearing (only), and is cylindrical in shape, whilst the outer bearing, which is tapered, is a thrust bearing. When the car is loaded up by either extra load, or cornering, the stresses on the wheel rise, and are transferred to the bearings. The outer bearing is designed to cope with sidethrust, the inner bearing with load carrying.

When the wheel track is widened, generally by fitting wider wheels and tyres, more load is transferred to the outer bearing, as the centre of the load is moved outboard. Wheel manufacturers can compensate for this by moving the centre disc of the wheel (the nave plate) further outboard, so that the extra width is carried inboard as well as outboard. These might be known as “deep dish wheels”.  It is possible to find wheels with the same hole spacing, which will fit on your hubs, but the offset may not be suitable for your car. Incidentally, the wheel is located on its “Bore Hole” the centre hole, and the wheel nuts are located on studs at a specified “Pitch Circle Diameter” (P.C.D.), which is what you find in wheel makers’ catalogues.

The life of the outer bearing is important. Should it collapse, then the car’s steering can be greatly affected, and it can lead to loss of steering control. Designers of front wheel drive cars are well aware of the risks, the front wheel drive is already “busy” steering and driving, so they applaud these limitations. A note of caution- if your FWD car’s drive joints screech when you corner hard, please get them replaced. If they collapse, you might end up in “big trouble”. How much trouble depends on the design of the front end.

Queensland Corvette Convention 2007

CarbonBlack checked out the Queensland Corvette Convention over the Easter weekend at Broadbeach in the Gold Coast. In a word…gorgeous….the men and their machines, the woman, the day, the weather. I spoke with Brent Carr of Mosman, NSW. Brent purchased his tired, tossed aside 1958 Corvette through a classified section of an auto magazine and has spent the last 13 years remodelling. And it shows.

Brent Carr of Mosman with his 1958 beauty!