The Green Striped Bridgestone Tires
The new Formula One cars have been hit by the ugly stick thanks to the weak design parameters the FIA has come up. There is one thing worse than their design – the green striped tires.
Since the FIA apparently has nothing else to do, it kept the two tire compound rule for the 2009 season. One has to wonder how this ties in with the “save money” theme, but that’s F1 for you. If you don’t know, the cars are given two sets of Bridgestone tires each weekend during the practice session. One set is softer than the other. The teams must use both compounds at some point in the race with at least a minimum of one lap being completed.
There are a host of problems with this bizarre rule. One of the simple ones that came up was how anyone watching the race was supposed to know which tire was being used. The first answer was to put a white dot on the soft tires. The lunacy of this approach quickly became apparent since the tires rotate at a few thousand revolutions per minute. Nobody could see them!
The next approach was to put a white strap on the softer tires. This seemed to work very well. You could not only see that the car in question was using the soft tires, you could also see how the tire was wearing as the white stripe started to disappear. This was particularly interesting since you could really see what was happening with rear tires, which are usually very hard to see based on the camera angles.
Well, the powers that be in FIA decided the old white stripe just wasn’t good enough. I am sure you’ve seen the nasty new methodology. Yes, the softer version of the tire comes with a sort of neon green on the inside and outside end of the tires. Oh, dear. To say we are venturing into areas of visually unappealing is a minor understatement. First, it appears as though the stripes are not even straight! They seem to wander along the edge as though some 6 year old tried to draw a line.
The biggest problem with these green stripes is they constitute a weapon of mass visual destruction on certain cars. A front view of the Renault of Fernando Alonso racing down the front stretch is enough to blind anyone. You have green, yellow, orange, white and god knows what other colors. It sounds like a stupid thing, but it just ads to the sense Formula One made some major mistakes in the offseason.
The color of the strips on the Bridgestone tires are undoubtedly a minor problem. The existence of them, however, points out a bigger issue. Formula One made some good changes in the offseason, but they also seem to have made some just for the sake of making changes. From the ugliest Formula One cars in the history of the sport to the green striped Bridgestone tires, many of these changes were a mistake.
Lemmy