The Formula E Championship entered a new era this season as the all-electric series hit the track with the Gen3 car, which promised greater performance in several areas over its predecessor.
But the new machine was not the only new aspect to the championship, as Hankook arrived as the category’s sole tyre supplier. The South Korean manufacturer had big shoes to fill replacing Michelin, which had supplied rubber to Formula E since its inception in 2014.
While the name on the side of the tyre may have been different, the purpose was the same – to be used in all weather conditions and temperatures, as well as on various surfaces. It’s a challenge made even greater due to the previously unknown quantities of the Gen3 machine, and just how much performance it had gained over the previous iteration of car.
“This was the big challenge because we started almost from zero when we started our development work, and there was no car available at all,” says Manfred Sandbichler, Hankook’s European motorsport director. “It meant we had to go through it in a different way to get the first impressions and then, as soon as the first car was ready, we adjusted the tyre to the car.
“We were pretty much satisfied with the first run and from this moment the focus was on fine-tuning to find the right compound, to have the right balance from the rear axle and of course also the right balance between dry and wet. But this was a real challenge to find and therefore compliments to our engineers and technical team to find this in a really short time, because the time period for testing was also very much limited.”
This time period with the Gen3 car was the equivalent of “almost half a year”, according to Sandbichler. Not long to ensure that the tyre was capable of withstanding vastly different conditions.
The two extremes during the season came only a round apart, as the deluge that hit the season finale at the London E-Prix followed just two weeks after the heatwave in Rome. The Hankook tyre came through in both conditions, and perhaps more impressively there were no failures or punctures outside of those caused by accident damage during the season.
“It was very tricky to develop the tyre for all these conditions because you can have only one set of tyre, you cannot have a wet and slick,” says three-time Le Mans 24 Hours winner Benoit Treluyer, Formula E’s test driver who was integral to the Hankook tyre’s development.
Source: Autosport