Saturday, July 16, 2016 seemed like a normal day in Formula 1, with no activity on the circuits, but there was a guy from the big circus who didn’t like his breakfast. Very bad. There was no race that weekend, although there was the previous one, and there would be another the next. Actually, it was the latter that gave him the creeps … or the tie thing.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk introduced Turkey to Western modernity, but the Ottoman country is not without certain peculiarities despite being a democracy, and one of them is its not entirely reliable political stability. For this reason, that Pirelli employee, in charge of the logistics business, almost threw the breakfast espresso on the table when he heard on the radio in his kitchen that in the Turkish streets there were tanks competing for their own Grand Prix. It is not that the Italian suffered for the local citizenship or the government of Tayip Erdogan, but for something much more mundane: for the nearly two thousand tires that had to arrive a few days later at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
That guy broke out in a cold sweat and left breakfast on the table to shoot out to make a string of calls. With a nervous, asynchronous voice and with a more than evident concern he was telephoning all those involved in the chain of people who intervened in the arrival of his shipment of rubber to the assembly point on the Hungaroring circuit. In that race Lewis Hamilton stole the portfolio from the later champion Nico Rosberg and neither of them complained about their wheels, but it was not long before, perhaps hours, for the entire planet to have seen that Sunday a race of cars standing and standing, motionless, on their trestles.
With the deluge of SUVs that is falling on the market, the average diameter of the tire has almost defaulted to 18
After the traumatic experience, in Milan they made a drastic decision in this regard: move the production of Formula 1 tires to one of the nineteen factories owned by the firm and not give them this kind of bad time. In a globalized world, the commitment made in 2007 to provide tires for the second most followed sport in the world could not be left to the discretion of politicians who you cannot completely trust. Soon after, and it was neither easy nor cheap, the production of the wheels for the Formula 1 It went to the Slatina factory, in southern Romania; the same where they make the wheels of the Mercedes and Audi street. If this was a ruckus at the time, now the Pirelli employee in charge of getting his cargo to each race is sleeping a little better. Every time she takes a look at the coffee pot George Clooney sold her on television in which he makes his espressos, she remembers that morning when she almost had to rip her heart out of the wall with a spatula. In the Turkish factory in Izmit they continue to build racing tires, such as those for GT and other categories, but due to their different stock, service life and distribution formulas they allow another type of more flexible management.
Pirelli are very happy with the change to 18-inch wheels. It is a claim that they have long held because being subjected to building 13-inch tires forces them to maintain exclusive mounting systems that are expensive and not very usable. The smallest wheel that exists in the Italian catalog is the 14-inch wheel and it is about to disappear to be one of 15 the smallest diameter that they manufacture. It happens a bit like when Goodyear made the wheels of the Tyrrell six-wheeler: they had no application for the brand beyond meeting this specific need, which made production very expensive. If in supercars the 18-inch wheel is the standard, with the deluge of SUVs that is falling on the market, the average diameter of the tire in street vehicles has become almost by default 18. And if that measure seems too big for your utility vehicle, write down what comes in: cars with 24.5-inch wheels are already being homologated … which means that there are trucks that have them smaller. Add an extra element of judgment: the 18-inch tire, for whatever reason, is the most profitable of all. With the little ones it is not that they lose money, but they do not earn what they do with this other.
Money? Despite charging teams for their tires (a symbolic figure of less than 1.5 million euros per season), Pirelli spends a lot of money on marketing. To reduce the onerous bill for everything related to F1, the Milan firm puts its hands in the pockets of its national subsidiaries. From his local company in each country in which he operates he takes an average of 30% of his funds from his marketing budgets. Pirelli understands that its presence in the specialty is of planetary interest and since the benefit is also local, the locals get away with what they need, which is a lot. Thanks to all this fuss, the brand sells many wheels all over the world, but if you know exactly how much a tire costs for your compact paid in installments … How much does a Formula 1 wheel cost? And the truth is that you know what you pay for them but not what they cost, a fact that is guarded with zeal within the company but assumes that they know with total security. If each team pays that million odd euros and is divided by the approximately 4,000 wheels that a team consumes a year, it appears that the bill puts a little less than 400 euros per tire, but it is known that it is a political price. It is just that price, four hundred a wing, what it costs the wheels with which Pirelli supplies its World Rally Car customers, but the most widespread suspicion among experts and analysts is that Formula 1 tires cost around twice as much. In a thick line calculation, and if we start from the basis that a wheel weighs ten kilos, it could well tell you that the Pirelli kilo comes out to 80 euros.
Nor is it known whether 80 euros or even more is what the many fans who invariably contact the brand every week with the same question: “Could I get one of those used tires?” The correct answer, as if it were Pasapalabra, is “no, don’t even dream of it, kid.” The only one who has managed to get hold of a used wheel after a Grand Prix has been Valtteri BottasBut not because she asked for it, but because she got stuck in the pitstop of the Monaco Grand Prix. The right forward of the Finn was imprisoned during what was defined as “the longest pitstop in history”, 43 hours. Pirelli stood in front of the Mercedes box demanding its wheel but to slide the tire they needed to use hydraulic machinery that arranged them horizontally. Given the impossibility of placing the tire hijacking car in this way, they allowed that wheel to march to the Mercedes facilities in Brackley, but not without first sealing it and taking certain security measures.
Pirelli goes to great lengths to protect the mysteries of its tires for two reasons: technology leakage and thus intellectual property, and that some teams may know more than others based on superior knowledge of layers, components and compounds. It is known that each tire consists of a hundred parts distributed in eighteen different components, but the teams can only put them on their cars and return them once used. What’s more, those who mess with them are Pirelli technicians assigned to each formation, hardly personnel from each team. Formula 1 consumes almost 40,000 wheels a year, at the rate of about two thousand per car. But if you think that this is a mess for the Milanese, you don’t know that they are in other fatter toasts such as the 24 Hours of Spa, and there it really is. The brand brings a whopping thirteen thousand tires to the Belgian track. Yes, 13,000 wheels, you read that right, about seven times more than at an F1 Grand Prix. The structure arranged in the form of assemblers, engineers, analysts, logistics and peripheral personnel almost triples as a whole to what is bundled in Formula 1. Only the team of assemblers that works 24 hours a day is multiplied by five. It is like a city within another city: Villagoma de la Rueda, its own municipality within the periphery of the paddock.
The calorific power provided by its elements, carbon, sulfur, and natural and synthetic rubber make tires a material capable of burning above 1300 degrees.
The only thing that has the Pirelli logo stamped and that can house an F1 factory are the four wheels per car with which they provide the teams with so that they can transport, the so-called Show Tires. The compound is very hard, vaguely similar to that of street cars, they do not serve to make times, they are scratched with a pattern similar to that of passenger cars. Once the racing wheels have been used and with all the pain in his heart — we assume he has it — an employee of the firm mercilessly slashes each used tire with a tool similar to a cutter, but bigger and unusable. After this bloody assault with a knife they are sent to the English town of Didcot where they are taken to recycle. As a general rule, they usually end up in a plant that uses them as fuel to cook cement and bricks. The calorific power provided by its elements, carbon, sulfur, and natural and synthetic rubber make tires a material capable of burning above 1,300 degrees, something ideal for this type of activity.
Do you remember that of ‘the mad cow crisis’? For sick bovidae turned to ash in a place like this because of those abilities. It’s quite possible that when they had to eliminate them, in the late 90s, they did so using racing tires as a process accelerator. Before setting fire to them, the tires are pitted, smashed, and with luck and a little eye, the employees of the cement factory can observe the stickers with the barcode that each tire carried in life. If they had access to the data they would know when it was manufactured, how the X-ray image to which it was subjected before leaving for the circuit gave, which pilot wore it and on what exact day it passed away. It is the DNI of each tire. That guy, clad in a corporate orange jumpsuit and covered with a white helmet, will not say an answer to death by cremation. But if you are a fan of F1 you should not less than remove your protection for a moment, and thank the now defunct wheels for their contribution to the show. Rest in peace, you already earned it.