The three basic elements of racing-acceleration, braking and cornering-all

require forces to be transmitted from the road to the car via the tyre contact
patches.
This chapter considers :
how a car tyre reacts to both lateral forces in cornering
1- and longitudinal forces in acceleration and braking
2- showing how selecting appropriate tyres and tuning the stiffness of the front and
rear suspensions can produce a car with the desired degree of understeer/
oversteer balance.

Many formulae adopt control tyres

The basic dry-weather tyre
is the slick which has no tread, to maximise the area of rubber in contact with
the road
Wets contain significant grooves which are added to enable the tyre to displace
water and hence avoid aquaplaning

The two basic elements of the tyre are the carcase and the wearing course or
tread.
The carcase forms the underlying structure of the tyre and consists of cords
in a relatively soft rubber matrix

The cords are laid in layers or plies and are made

of materials such as nylon, steel or Kevlar

In a radial-ply tyre the principal

cords
run at 90 to the direction of travel,
however these are supplemented
by further
reinforcing belts under the tread
area. In a bias-ply or cross-ply tyre
the cords run
at 45 to the direction of travel.
radials providing more ultimate grip but with a sharper decline in grip after the peak. This makes it
more difficult to balance a car on radials. Bias-ply tyres are lesspeaky and consequently more
forgiving

Tyre companies keep the details of thei compounds a closely guarded secret

The grip from a racing tyre can be considered to have three components:
1. Friction-where the friction coefficient varies with both temperature and
sliding speed.
2. Interlocking - where the rubber deforms around the micro-bumps and
depressions in the road surface.
3. Adhesion-where a tyre actually sticks itself to the road, particularly when
at working temperature (80-110C).

For components 2 and 3 grip increases with tyre width.

Components1and 2 combined with gravity loads from the weight of the
car and driver are loosely termed mechanical grip. Components 1 and 2
combined with aerodynamicloads from wings etc.form aero grip. Component
3 is chemical grip.

5.2.1 Cornering - understeer and oversteer:

The difference between the direction of motion and the longitudinal axis of the tyre is the slip angle
The harder the wind blows, the greater the grip forces required and the greater the slip angle developed
but The slip angle increases with side-force until, for racing tyres, reaching a maximum limit at about 7-
10, at which point the tyre does let go and start to slide across the road surface