Intermediates on dry surface

[wrigs]

Well someone from F1DB.com just linked to this site and I knew I had to register

As referred to in the title, you often see F1 cars on intermediate tyres even on dry surfaces. Obviously not during the race weekends, but on shakedowns, street-shows etc. Why is this? Is it just to clear the surface of dirt and pebbles?

I've tried doing a quick search on this, but nothing came up.

[Sawtooth-spike]

From what i remember its something to do with the Ambiant temperature being lower so inters are more consistant because they have a wider operating window.

Interesting to see what they do with slicks coming in. As they will need a lot of running on those tyres in the winter.

[DaveKillens]

Hello wrigs, welcome to the forum.
I suggest that for quick shakedowns and domonstrations, just slapping on a set of inters is sufficient. You don't want to carry around a few extra sets of wheeels and tires for these situations, as well, inters can handle about any weather or track scenario the car has to deal with. Inters also add a few millimeters of increased ground clearance, a good thing for uncharted tracks.

[Jersey Tom]

No reason to get a fresh set of slicks dirty or full of rocks if you can roll around on an old set of rains.

[wrigs]

Alright, guess it makes some sense

So the grooves don't really have an effect on anything but water on the surface?

[WhiteBlue]

F1 tyres do not last very long when you have surplus. The soft rubber isn't completely vulcanised and the chemical reactions tend to continue changing the properties over time. I reccon they have a lot more rain tyres left over after the season than grooved dry tyres and so they could use them up in non critical test for economic reasons. You also have to consider that all team are equal in the restrictions about the umber of tyres they are allowed to buy and there must be a mix in the wet to dry sets. so they will have to use the wets up in the dry when they have no opportunity to run them.

[freedom_honda]

and according to one of the videos on Honda Racing TV, inter/extreme produces more smoke. good for the show.

[boci]

Teams get their race tires on the race weekends so its more likely to be something about how the tires behave on the asphalt instead of saving the tires for the next race.

[persovik]

You can run intermediates from quite cold. Running dry weather tires is difficult when the running gets interrupted and the surface isn't very grippy and you're not running very hard in the first place, you simply don't produce any heat. They also run different brake pads, since the racing pads will glaze whe not used properly.

[TheChad]

Inters have a lower operating temperature, so they will produce a fair amount of grip out of the box. The harder compound dry tyres will have a higher operating temperature so they need to be pushed harder to get up to the correct operating temperature. If you are just driving around slowly, like they do for those displays and shakedowns, then inters will offer much more grip than the dry tyres. Whenever they through journalists in f1 cars they put inters on as they know that they won't push hard enough to get the tyres up to temp.