That'll Buff Right Out ...

There has been a lively debate among Formula One fans regarding the cause of Kimi Raikkonen's crash at the European Grand Prix. As I noted here, Kimi's McLaren suffered a spectacular crash at the beginning of the last lap of the race. The onboard cameras had caught a tremendous vibration in the right front wheel over the several laps preceding the crash, which the commentators traced to a couple of instances when Raikkonen locked his brakes, causing a flat spot on the tire. The vibration eventually destroyed the brittle carbon-fiber suspension, spinning Raikkonen out of the race.

The question then arises: why didn't the driver switch tires when the vibration because intolerable? The answer is that F1 requires the teams to use the same set of tires from qualifying through the race. If you watch any other racing series on TV, you will see that tires are routinely and frequently changed on race cars. F1, in contrast, instituted the single tire rule this year in a effort to reduce costs in this most costly series, only allowing changes for "damaged" tires; flat-spotting, being the driver's fault, is not considered "damage." This leads to the classic plea: will we have to wait for someone to be killed before this rule is abolished? Frankly, that may be overstating it a bit, since it is possible that McLaren could have made a case that the tire was creating a dangerous condition and replaced it. Kimi would not have won, but he would have picked up valuable championship points.

To me, the most fascinating aspect of this entire affair is observing how effective the tethers that hold the wheel hubs to the car were in preventing injury to the driver or spectators. Participants and fans alike have been injured and killed in recent years due to crash debris flying off the cars. While body panels can be dangerous, their low mass usually limits collateral damage. Wheels and tires, on the other hand, are extremely dangerous when they become detatched from the car at any speed, but particularly at racing speeds in excess of 150 mph. Many open-wheel sanctioning bodies have now instituted rules that require wheels to be tethered to the car by steel cables to prevent them from become deadly projectiles.

As you can see from Kimi's crash, the tethers worked perfectly. While the F1 single tire rule still seems to be an imperfect solution to a problem nobody was concerned about, which unfortunately has led directly to at least one dangerous event, the tethers are a simple solution to a significant problem that we would only hear about if the solution hadn't been put into place.