The dark art of Race tyre engineering

Lights out Alice!

Yes, i know that pun was intended (and if you didn't get the pun in the title of the post, greetings sarcasm impaired creature of the world), but bad jokes are my forte.

In this world of knowledge at our fingertips, all that prohibits us from knowing everything and excelling is our own conscience. The laziness inside us that forces us to prohibitively delay and procrastinate on everything that we do, be it as simple as a search online on some topic that we lack knowledge on.

After procrastinating this question in my mind for over a year (yes, i am a champion level procrastinator (p.s: Champion level procrastinator: one who could be a world champion achiever if not for his procrastinating lifestyle)), i finally got myself round to searching it online.

The question: What is scrubbing a race tyre and why is it important?

The answer was found on this website: https://m.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=67

Before i start quoting them, i would like to say that this website is a treasure trove of information on tyre data and is a good starting point for information on little things related to cars and tyres that lazy people like you and me would never go through a book to know about.

You can read the entire article over on their page (i strongly recommend you to do that one not-so-lazy thing today), but i will quote the most important paragraph:



One of the reasons radial racing slicks are so effective is they feature shallow tread depths, and their contact patch acts as a single unit. However, any tread design that breaks up the contact patch into smaller elements or adds additional tread depth (required to enhance wet traction) will increase tread block squirm and reduce dry performance. This means that tires typically provide their worst wet traction and their best dry performance just before they wear out. It's also important to remember that the heat generated every time a tire is driven activates bonding agents in the rubber. As this process is repeated continually throughout the tire's life, its rubber compounds gradually harden and lose flexibility, reducing the tire's grip. Therefore, a shaved new tire will provide more traction than a tire worn to the exact same tread depth after being driven for thousands of miles on the road.

Tire shaving is an effective means of permitting more of a tire's performance capability to be realized early in its life. And in many cases, shaved tires used in competition actually have a longer useful life than tires that enter competition at full tread depth.

The process removes tread rubber and reduces tire weight by several pounds. A shaved tire's tread profile will usually result in a slight increase in the width of the tire's contact patch, putting a little more rubber on the road. The resulting shallower tread depths reduce the tire's slip angle, increasing its responsiveness and cornering power by minimizing tread block squirm.

Minimizing tread block squirm also reduces heat buildup and the risk of making the tire go "off" by overheating its tread compound. Depending on the severity of overheating, the overworked areas of the tread compound may turn blue, tear, blister or chunk.

Stay safe Alice!

The Mechanics of Fluids can be cool, if you want

Lights out Alice!

Greatness is everywhere. It is just that we never take the time to see it. In this mad rush we would like to call daily life, all we ever do is lie to ourselves as to what is important in life.
Everyday i make mistakes, every day i lose a battle on some front, and i am okay with it. It kills me to the core to see my conscience dying everyday, being unable to shake my very being from the shackles of constant failure that paralyze my ability to succeed day in and day out and in essence, to succeed at all. I have gotten so used to failing to meet my goals everyday that i am unfazed by such failure, to the extend that procrastination in the worst form is taking over my lifestyle, and though i am aware of it's existence, i can only watch as it leads in its wake a terrible remnant of destructive, constrictive and decaying habits.

I keep on my board over 10 pending items, yet somehow i find time to waste over fictional televised issues of apparent international concern. I believe that the level of procrastination that i am currently at is the most painful and yet painless one to be in. Painful, because i sit here typing as my future dims and the shining light to eternal content is waning gently, but constantly. Painless, because even though i can feel it, breathe it, loathe it and yes, write about it, i am unable to stop this monster called procrastination, its destructive generals halfheartedness and indiscipline.

Man, this fight with the monster inside seems to be the one i am always losing, but the real struggle and the biggest torture is that i don't fail, or i don't get killed. No, the monster will not let me go that easy. It wants me to feel my life slipping, my dreams fading further and further away from me as i sink deeper into the quicksand of mediocrity and adjustment. 

The biggest pain that this monster is inflicting upon me is not physical pain, not emotional strain, it is the irk that i will feel for the rest of my life, the irk that will tell me when i will be part of a middle class "decent" pay society, when i will have a "settled family" and "responsibilities", that i could have risen to be something better and beyond what the society pulls you down to, that i could have been someone, but i chose wasting my time watching TV soaps over building a future, over disciplining my life.

p.s: Don't worry, my fast forgetting memory would forget about discipline faster than it forgets names of people it should remember and i will go back to the comfort and care of procrastination very soon, who would welcome me back with loving arms.

Ah i see, you are looking for wisdom on how fluid mechanics is cool, so let me link it below:

http://www.explainthatstuff.com/aerodynamics.html

For starters, i have been a student studying fluid mechanics for a while now and it gets to me every time that the books i read on the one thing that is everywhere is able to turn it into something that is so remote, unimaginable and alien a concept that we all just end up mugging the formulas and asking ourselves why we thought it would be a good idea to study the subject in the first place.

Well here it is, the one paragraph from that article that lit my mind on fire (forgive my puns):

Boundary Layer:
The idea of the boundary layer leads to all kinds of interesting things. It explains why, for example, your car can be dusty and dirty even though it's racing through the air at high speed. Although it's traveling fast, the air right next to the paintwork isn't moving at all, so particles of dirt aren't blown away as you might expect them to be. The same applies when you try to blow the dust off a bookshelf. You can blow really hard, but you'll never blow all the dust away: at best, you just blow the dust (the upper layers of dust particles) off the dust (the lower layers that stay stuck to the shelf)! The boundary layer concept also explains why wind turbines have to be so high. The closer to the ground you are, the lower the wind speed: at ground level, on something like concrete, the wind speed is actually zero. Build a wind turbine that's way up in the sky and you're (hopefully) reaching beyond the boundary layer to the place where the air speed is a maximum and the wind has higher kinetic energy to drive the turbine's rotors.
Stay inspired and Lights out Alice!