I’d imagine it also summons an FIA scrutineer. Tire temps are highly regulated these days. But, much like Darth Vader it’s super awesome you got to see them with your own eyes!
I think the latest push from a couple of years ago (currently delayed indefinitely, probably forever at this point) was using the optics of energy consumption, but I think the real reason is probably moot now that they have cost caps.
It costs about $1.5 million for a single team to run their tire warmers for a year, which is 1.1% of their overall budget. Back when smaller teams were spending $100 mil a year just to come in DFL and bigger teams were approaching half a billion, eliminating 1% of a team’s costs that really didn’t contribute to better racing (and, maybe even makes it worse – we all love unpredictability, and cold tires are unpredictable) was an easy target.
But the teams pretty much unanimously objected for safety reasons, and history has shown that cost savings rarely materialize – if a top team was spending, say, $1.5 million a year just on the tire warmers, they’d happily spend an additional $3 million a year on materials engineers to figure out how best to manage tire temps in their absence. And the smaller teams wouldn’t be able to keep up. So the warmers themselves add a lot of parity while keeping the cars more predictable, which all the teams seem to want.
My wife and I just finished watching F1 Academy on Netflix, a seven-part series about the newest racing series that’s trying to get women into the ladder series for F1. It’s good to see that there are women getting their start in karts as young as some of our current male F1 drivers, and one who made the transition from rally cross to open wheel.
But even there, where F1 and the major teams are subsidizing the drivers, it’s clear that less talented women from rich families have more of a leg up than more talented drivers without those resources.
Although a few women have tested in F1 cars in recent years (including Toto Wolff’s wife, Susie, who now heads the F1 Academy program), only two have actually driven in a Grand Prix race, Maria Teresa de Filippis (three races in the late 1950s) and Lella Lombardi (a dozen starts, 1974-76). Lombardi won half a point in the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, the only points ever won by a woman. Fifty years ago!
I’d love to see more women in motorsports, because I’m convinced that, unlike other sports, where physical strength is a big advantage, there’s no reason women couldn’t do as well as men. But there are still some cultural barriers that are holding women back. The barriers are starting to fall, but it seems it’ll be at least a few years before we see a woman on a F1 grid.
It’s been this forever in the sport. Lance Stroll shouldn’t be allowed to drive a taxi, but his daddy owns the team.
I can see why the warmers themselves might cost that much, but no way does the electricity come anywhere close to that. Just rough ballpark, let’s say 24 races, 5 hours per day (includes preheating time), 3 days (practice+qual+race), 80 tires, 500 watts per tire. That’s 14,400 kWh, or about $5000 in electricity costs. And really should be less since you don’t need to heat every tire on every day (don’t need to heat tires that get used up, for one…).
The blankets themselves are clearly expensive with all the monitoring. But you’d think they’d last several years before replacement.
They’re limited in how many tires they can have warming at any one time (I think 5 sets per car), but I don’t think they’d let them cool down once they’re in the warmers as heat cycling affects the compound. And everything is times 2 because they run 2 cars, plus the cost to develop and maintain the equipment and fly it around. F1 accounting has got to be a nightmare, especially now that the cost cap mandates their accounting standards. Every kilogram of equipment that travels with the team costs an appreciable amount in jet fuel.
I have no idea how much of that 1.5 million figure is actual electricity costs but with most things F1 it’s everything around the thing that’s expensive. There’s probably a whole team of engineers dedicated to the warming algorithms and probably 2 blokes in Brackley on salary every weekend to monitor the system remotely or some crap.
Other series run without tire warmers and they manage just fine, but F1’s tire rules are… complex.
For sure. I’m just arguing that their “environmental” argument is silly. As you said, if the warmers are banned then the teams will spend that budget on some other tech that has just as much environmental impact, because it’ll have to be jetted around with everything else, require people to maintain it, etc. If they want to reduce environmental impact, they can reduce the budget cap. That would actually force teams to work with fewer resources.
Oh, yes, for sure. The environmental argument was a fig leaf.
Saw the movie, liked it, definitely one to watch in theaters, if only because I doubt the spectacle will hold up on a TV screen. Don’t, uh, watch if for the plot or hyper realism of the racing, though.
Woke up and turned the tube on, and caught the last couple minutes of FP1.
Some unknown (I never heard of him) went P4 in Lando’s car. Meaningless, but interesting.
Alex Dunne. He’s leading the F2 championship this year. I watch all those races and he’s a bit too aggressive but otherwise very impressive.
Curious, where are you able to watch the F2 action?
I was rather surprised while watching Ford v. Ferrari. Apparently, passing another car is just a matter of deciding you want to, then downshifting and stepping on the gas. I always thought there was more to it than that.
I can catch it on F1TV.
Great race! That first stint was excellent! Bad day for Williams, which sucked, and a bad day for max, which I didn’t mind. It wasn’t his fault and he didn’t even get a chance to be a prick, thankfully. So I’m glad it wasn’t a verstappen story all day again. Piastri made a good run at the end, but Norris has in the bag! More races like this, please!
Yeah, that was a pretty good one. Nice to see aggressive but clean racing. That’s been long absent lately.
I really feel sorry for Carlos. He deserves better.
HULKENBURG! WOOOOOOOO! Also, good job McLaren I guess.
Bad day to be a rookie.
I watch on F1TV (I usually just watch the highlights of F3 but I watch the full F2 races). They have extended highlight packages on YouTube though.
I love wet races; they equalize the field because mistakes are so much easier to make, even for the best drivers. The decision on when to change tires can make or break a driver’s race.
I think Oscar’s slowing behind the safety car was a little too extreme, but I also think a 10-second penalty was a little too severe.