![]() ![]() There are endless discussions about how sensitive tyres are to temperatures, and very little documentation publically available that is relative to race tyres. Tyre surface temperature effects on performance are normally represented with a quadratic curve. A lot of energy is invested in setting the car up (on the engineers side) and on driving it (on the drivers side) in a way that allows the best compromise between performance and durability. Nonetheless, it is universally accepted that tyres performance depends a lot on temperature and pressure management. This makes it very difficult to properly understand how each parameter influences performance and behaviour. There is a strong interconnection between each parameter, and it is extremely difficult to isolate each phenomenon during testing. This again has an influence on tyre heating and final temperatures.Įverything connected to tyres pressure and temperature is extremely difficult to measure and study. As we have seen, pressure also has an impact on tyre stiffness and contact patch shape. Pressure and TemperatureĪ Tyre’s pressure and temperature (with their effects on grip, stiffness, etc) are probably the most complex parameters to analyze because they are so closely related to each other.Īn increase in temperature is normally associated also to an increase in pressure. A compromise must often be found to have both acceptable performance and durability. It also has a direct impact on tyre heating and wear. The friction coefficient simply increases without reaching any inversion point, at least up to the maximum shown camber angle.Ĭamber has significant impact on tyre performance and a lot of attention is paid when designing suspension to trying to set the correct camber angle. On the other side, if we look at the plot relative to load 4, we cannot identify any maximum. We can identify how, for smaller vertical loads (see for example load 1), the friction coefficient (that here refers to the maximum lateral force (or peak force) that the tyre can produce at the given vertical load) goes up reaching a maximum at a certain camber angle and then start to decrease. ![]() This is well shown in the following picture, where loads increases moving from “Load 1” to “Load 4” (tyre friction coefficient is higher for lower vertical loads): Higher loaded tyres normally accept larger camber angles without experiencing any saturation. How big camber thrust is depends on the design of the tyre itself, but both effects are normally related to vertical load too. Physically, the reason of camber trust is a distortion of the contact patch, with the road applying a force on the tread trying to rotate the tyre back in a straight up position. The increase in a force is associated to a contribution that is often referred as camber thrust. In parallel to this, it also normally reduces the available longitudinal grip. Negative camber normally produces an increase of maximum lateral forces (at least on the outside tire) and a change in slip curve’s shape, up to a certain point at which this effect saturates and there is an inversion. Normally race cars use a certain amount of negative camber, with the top of the tyre leaning in towards the inside of the car. Camber angle – The inclination of the wheel in front view.To close this series of articles about tyres, we will look to some of the settings and metrics that have the biggest effect on tyre performance: Part 2 – Road Interaction & Contact Patch Grip. ![]()
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