Once a significant factor in motorsport, opportunities for tyre suppliers to compete against each other have become preciously limited. But is that a good thing?
The dramatic sight of Damon Hill’s Bridgestone-shod Arrows overtaking the Goodyear-rubberedof old rival Michael Schumacher for the lead in the 1997 Hungarian Grand Prix is one of the enduring images of the decade in Formula 1. For a different reason, so was the sight of Schumacher, now with Bridgestones on his Prancing Horse, leading away a grid of six cars at Indianapolis in 2005 after the withdrawal of Michelin’s runners on safety grounds.
“Definitely we’re not interested in a tyre war,” insists FE co-founder Alberto Longo. “We’re way more interested in a sporting equality. Having two sets of tyres, coming from two different manufacturers, the tyre could give you three seconds’ advantage. That would go, in my point of view, against the sporting equity of any sporting property.”
“Ask a team the number of tests they had to perform in this situation in the past with the tyre wars compared to the current situation, ask the tyre manufacturer the number of tyres they used in this situation of tyre wars – it’s not comparable,” the former deputy team principal of Citroen’s World Rally Championship operation adds.
Goodyear’s position as the sole approved LMP2 tyre supplier has given it scope to slash the number of compounds it brings to every World Endurance Championship race. The company has developed a single slick-tyre specification capable of working across the full threshold of temperatures, from 40C in Bahrain to 4C at Spa, and ditched its intermediate offering to instead present teams with a single wet option that boasts a wider working window.
For a promoter, there are clear commercial upsides to working with a single supplier too. Even at the peak of its manufacturer involvement, the DTM shied away from tyre competition, instead partnering with Dunlop, then Hankook, Michelin and now Pirelli.
"The spectators don’t see the development in the tyres, they are still black and round since 200 years! They don’t take so much care about the technology and the differences between the tyres"“Many people criticise Pirelli about the product, but nobody knows exactly if the tyre is bad or if the tyre is really good,” van der Grint reckons. “You can only judge that if there is another one.
It’s difficult to see a way back for tyre wars in sportscar racing, which is reliant upon Balance of Performance to secure manufacturer participation. Nawarecki points out that in the context of the WEC it “would be completely impossible to manage” BoP with a tyre war. In such a circumstance, the WEC “would be a completely different championship”.
And in those series that do still welcome tyre competition, the model isn’t easily transplantable elsewhere. Gow is in no doubt that tyre wars don’t benefit the competition because “inevitably, one tyre dominates”. As a result, he’s clear that it won’t be coming back to the BTCC for the first time since 1998, when Audi ditched its Dunlops and joined the rest on Michelins at the height of the Super Touring era.
“As a pure engineering enthusiast – someone who is really involved in the detail – I can see where they would see plus points in a tyre war,” he says. “Looking at a general competitor point of view, I see a huge benefit to not having tyre wars. The Scot recalls his first Super GT test at Fuji in 2005 with wonderment as a car he’d thought would be comparable to the Opel Vectra he’d raced in the 2004 DTM – both had sequential gearboxes and “decent” downforce – surpassed all expectations. Where the Opel “had a very small window of compliance in the tyre”, in the Toyota “you could play with the car in the corner”.
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