Open

TYRES: Scaling wear to race duration

From Monday 10th September @ 11:00 (GMT) tyre wear will be scaled to the duration of the race as follows:

• 100% duration race - tyres wear 0.5 times the current rate


• 75% duration race - tyres wear 0.66 times the current rate


• 50% duration race - no change


• 25% duration race - tyres wear 2 times the current rate

You will be able to preview the new wear rates in your practice laps after the release. We will postpone races for 3 hours after the change, so that anyone preparing for a race has time to preview the wear rates before using them. If you have enough data you could also work out the difference from the numbers above and what the implications will be for strategy.

Where did this idea come from?
In a recent thread about the dominance of hard tyres, I put forward suggestions to improve the situation which were well received. One of my suggestions was that in order to get an overall consensus on tyre performance, we had to start scaling them to race duration.

The reason for this suggestion is simple. I don't think we can achieve a consensus so long as all tyres wear at the same rate regardless of race duration. For example, you can run an entire 25% duration race on 1 set of hard tyres and never pit. Or, you can 1-stop in a 50% duration race on hards (the one everyone complains about). Therefore, if we scale wear to the race duration, so that 25% races will wear 2 times as fast as 50% races, then we'll have some uniformity across the board when we get feedback on the tyre balance. It should be roughly the same experience in all race durations, just happening at a faster pace in shorter races.

Even if after the change there are complaints about tyre balance, we will be more easily able to address them across the board, since they will likely apply to everyone and not just the leagues at a certain race duration.

Hi Brad, let me clear this up: I don't expect this one change to address everything in and of itself. We will be making further tweaks to tyres in the immediate aftermath of this change based on your feedback. It is the start of addressing it, not the end.

To quote my original suggestion from the thread I linked in the first post:



Because the second part of my suggestion is such a disruptive one, I feel we must do this one first and "get it out of the way" in order that we might be able to re-balance the tyres properly and uniformly across the board. Conservative changes are the name of the game when it comes to this stuff. We don't want to change multiple things at once in a big way, as this can undermine the ability to understand the impact of each change individually. You may feel the consequences of the change will be predictable, but there will likely be many more far-reaching implications which we cannot foresee until it hits a live environment.

Rest assured, the wait between this update and any further revisions to the tyres will not be like the wait for us to get on to this change in the first place. We will be responding within days to the feedback on this change to implement any suggestions on re-balancing the tyres, likely moving quickly to adjusting the wear-rates and/or performance levels of the individual tyres. At least when we do that, we will be able to know the changes are relatively consistent across all race durations, unlike now.

In response to immediate feedback, I've already decided to make a change to the implementation. This was also partly a mistake on my part when I wrote the post. We will use the 50% race duration as the benchmark, not the 100% race duration as previously stated when I first made the post.

The numbers have been updated accordingly.

Hi Jason, it had crossed my mind, but:


Scaling fuel is one such thing better done in isolation than lumped in with a myriad of other changes. It may turn out that it makes sense to do this after the tyre change, but there are also other ways to do it. E.g. we could make the impact of fuel weight scale or other effects that would have the same outcome.

By doing each one individually, we can give more thought to each individual change and analyse its impacts more clearly.

If this causes any imbalance among tyres we will quickly address it, within days. If SS become overpowered in 100% races then we'll just bring the tyres closer together on pace and/or wear. I don't see anything in the concerned posts so far that we can't address quickly within a couple of rounds of revisions.

The main thing I notice in any concerns is the implication that we think this is the end solution to everything - that's simply not the case and I'd call it a misunderstanding. We think it's the start, only one piece that we will build upon.