Row Man Gross-Gene wrote:It doesn't look quite right to my eye, but I could get used to it. The road relevance would be increased if there were more than one manufacturer involved, preferably three or four. Of course then they'd almost have to do away with the two compound rule.
To be honest, I don't buy the "road relevance" argument - even Pirelli themselves have more or less indicated that the reason for the change is purely for aesthetics and marketing.
"The tyres today look a lot more like the tyres we sell on a regular basis, so there is certainly a good argument for that. The other side is that there is less advertising space, so you have this strange conundrum between the two. I think you'd have to do it and find out, because it's something you can leverage better from a link from motorsport through to the roadcar business."
http://www.espn.co.uk/f1/motorsport/story/166653.htmlDanielPT wrote:I don't want this nonsense of 18" wheels. If it was an improvement over 13", I am sure someone in the 70s or 80s would have came up with this already. It is aesthetically hideous in such small cars and aero wise it will probably be a nightmare for the teams. Safety wise will also be worse, I reckon, if they manage to get loose. There is absolutely nothing to gain from this. Pirelli should be lobbying to scratch the two compound per race rule if they really wanted to save money...
As for the increased relevance to road cars, why not race with those in the first place? Then we can just stop this idiot notion of making single-seaters look like road cars. I also came to like F1 because the cars looked nothing like the boxy stuff we drive on the road, not because I wanted to see them similar. Jesus! When this will stop?
In the case of the 13" rims, I believe that the rim size has been fixed at 13" since the 1970's as a way of restricting braking performance by physically limiting the size of the brake disk that could be fitted to the car.
That said, it is true that the teams are rather reluctant to fit large rims to the cars - van der Garde commented that making a change of that magnitude would require a complete redesign of the suspension and brake ducting as well as causing a major alteration in the aerodynamic wake of the wheels. The other aspect is that it would require a change to the wheel tethering system that the FIA has developed - Pirelli have announced that each tyre is 4kg heavier than the current 13" rims, which I believe is a not insubstantial increase in the relative weight of the wheels and would no doubt require the wheel tethering system to be beefed up (which, in turn, would require changes to the chassis where the wheel tethers are attached).
