It is not surprising that the specially-made F1 tires have not been able to help much with the performance of a street car.
Can a set of F1 racing tires turn an ordinary street car into a respectable high-performance machine? The team of YouTube channel “Driven Media” decided to put this idea to the test and installed a set of F1 tires on their Caterham 270R. So can F1 racing tires improve the performance of a car like the Caterham? Let’s watch the video below.
If you’re a fan of Formula One racing, then you already know how fast this sport is about tires. Pirelli is currently the sole tire supplier in F1, and it is one of the few parts that is shared by all racing teams. As is known, F1 teams need to pour millions of dollars, and countless hours of hard work into the development of their cars, but like regular street cars, an F1 racing car still transmits force on the road surface by a set of rubber tires. In other words, no matter how well-built an F1 is, it won’t work without the right tires.
F1 teams have to spend a lot of time adjusting the tire temperature, to ensure optimal levels of grip, allowing the car to operate at full capacity on the track. These sturdy tires are warmed with a tire blanket before use so that the car has strong grip as it rushes out onto the track after a pit stop. Similar to an F1 racing car, these tires are not designed for casual road use as they are specialized tools for a single task.
Going back to the test situation in the video, how did a set of F1 soft tires perform on a Caterham when running on the track a bit and then on the street? As the folks at “Driven Media” had predicted, they couldn’t get the tires hot enough for optimal grip.These Pirelli tires are designed to handle the extreme temperatures of on-road , which means they’re not optimized for normal driving temperatures.Even when the Caterham was driven around on the track, the light track car couldn’t exert enough force on the tires to warm them up. .
While the special tires didn’t deliver the obvious performance improvement expected, they at least made the Caterham 270R look like a miniature F1 race car. The ultimate conclusion from this test is that F1 racing tires may not help your car’s performance, but they will make it look “cooler”.
