Tyre preparation is an art, and it needs to be performed in a special place as Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough explains…
INTERVIEW OLEG KARPOV PICTURE ZAK MAUGER
F1 UNCOVERED
1 “What you see here is the tyre preparation area in what we call the Tree House, a space between two trucks behind the team garage. This is where we store all the tyres we get from Pirelli before the weekend. Firstly, it’s a more consistent temperature compared with outside plus we don’t want the sunlight on the tyres because the UV [ultraviolet] isn’t good for the rubber. And it also keeps them from getting wet when it rains.
“These blankets are quite sophisticated. Over the years they’ve evolved a lot from the primary ones, with the main focus being to make sure they heat the tyre uniformly. The worst thing is to have an area of the tyre that isn’t hot enough. That can cause all sorts of problems, so a lot of effort goes into designing the elements to make sure you heat the tyre evenly. And obviously, with the change in regulations, you don’t want it to take too long because you can only have them on for two hours. You also don’t want them to overheat, because the FIA monitors it: it’s illegal to go over the temperature, so we have to have the control software that heats them up as quickly as possible, but not too much, otherwise the FIA would get the alarm and you’d be in trouble.
“It’s quite an art and, like everything in F1,it is something that’s constantly evolving. Now, in a cost-cap environment, you can’t buy new blankets every year because they’re also very expensive. But we’re trying to develop new ones every two or three years.”
2 “As you can see, we use two colours to distinguish our blankets. Blue is for Lance’s tyres and yellow is for Fernando’s – just to make sure the mechanics always get the right set. They are all allocated by the FIA, and if you get it wrong you get a penalty.
“It’s one of those jobs, tyre technician in this case, that sounds relatively simple, but actually it’s very important to get it right every single weekend, every single session. Because if everything goes well, people don’t notice – but if it doesn’t, it’s a complete disaster. So having good tyre technicians is a necessity.
3 “Then it’s important we always stack the tyres in the right order. So the fronts are always at the top and bottom and the rears are in the middle. A lot of it has to do with the order in which the tyres are taken off and put on
