I was excited and happy to get the brief from the FIA and Automobile Club de l’Ouest to develop tyres that work without using warmers for the 2023 World Endurance Championship. It’s a regulation change that Michelin has been strongly pushing for the last couple of years. We included it in our proposal answering the tender for Hypercar tyres in 2019 as an idea of an innovative change we could bring.
It can look odd for fans to see the family of racing spending energy to heat tyres – even when it’s 40C in Bahrain. It’s not easy to explain the need to do that when fewer series are depending on tyre warmers now. Having supplied the IMSA Sportscar Championship since early 2019, we said: “We feel capable of making tyres that start from cold and last two or three stints as long as it’s a different compound between Bahrain and Spa.”
We want to respect the safety of drivers because it’s in nobody’s interest to have accidents. And we know that a tyre starting at cold is never going to be as performant as its operating temperature range, so you want it to work relatively well at the first corner.
But a tyre that reaches its optimal window faster will normally drop off sooner, so we had a Catch-22. For it to be durable and reward those who don’t change tyres – I believe whoever can manage their materials the best should have an advantage – then it will take time to warm up because it’s a hard tyre. But we were confident that we had the technology and experience to make this possible.
The 2023 Hypercar tyres were developed entirely using simulation, a process that was well-defined from the range for 2021. We didn’t get any data on the previous generation of Hypercar tyres starting from cold because teams were still permitted to use tyre warmers, but we had plenty of information from the DPi tyres in IMSA about where we need to be and we had the information on the previous Hypercar tyres. So we devised a mix in the design philosophies to come up with a model which was tested in the simulator, and this helped us to define the three different compounds: the soft, medium and hard.
Source: Autosport