BECAUSE I don’t want Editor Benjamin Carrell to spend the remainder of his weekend sifting through, blocking and editing comments about whether mandatory Covid-19 Vaccinations should be a thing or not, I am not going to write about David Reynolds in this column this week.
Instead, you will be thrilled to know, I am going to write about tyres.
Which means there will be exactly no comments at all, because tyres are among the last things that stir the souls and the keyboard fingers of motorsport fans.
Yes, they are absolutely critical to the sport – it is remarkable that at any one time a combined 18” of rubber are all that separates 1400kg of race car doing 280km/hr from disaster – but they are also totally uninspiring.
As it turns out, the evolution of a majority of categories means that tyres are also fundamental to producing good racing.
Take Supercars, for example. If it wasn’t for the fact that Sydney Motorsport Park is so abusive to tyres that if it were human, it would be arrested and locked up for life, the racing there would be processional at best, tedious at worst.
That’s why the four weeks of Supercar racing at the venue each have a different set of tyre rules, designed to mix the racing up and produce the entertainment.
Which, to be fair, it does. There’s always fun in one guy chasing down the other guy when he’s got much fresher rubber – witness Will Brown hauling in Anton de Pasquale in the closing laps of Race 22 last week.
This weekend the difference between rubber will be even larger as Supercars opts to run a mixture of Hard and Soft compound rubber, which should be interesting and promote some more varied results.
It’s all interesting stuff and helps make for good racing.
The only problem is that the tyre narrative absolutely dominates the conversation throughout the weekend. It dominates the pit lane talk, it dominates the commentary and it dominates the interviews the drivers give.
I don’t know about you, but by the end of last weekend I was triggered every time I heard the term ‘tyre degradation’ and it’s taken me most of the week to get over it.
The problem is this is truly a no-win scenario.
Without the tyre games and the degradation and everything else the racing would be bad, and it’s entirely fundamental to how the races play out – which is why it is the number one topic of discussion on the TV.
It’s amplified at SMSP as well because the place is so brutal on the rubber.
Supercars, indeed, our whole sport, needs to be careful with this because to an uninformed viewer coming to the sport for the first time I would imagine it would just be incomprehensible. Five laps in of talk about soft, hard, undercut or overcut you’d do your head in and go watch the footy which you understand already.
The problem is, I’m honestly not sure what the solution is.. because if there is one it would already be in place.
But there surely has to be a way where we can produce good racing, continue to include pit stops and everything else that happens without having every second sentence uttered by the announcers a commentary on tyre wear.
At this point, the only solution I can see is – aside from completely reengineering the cars – to give everyone the most god awful, rock-hard rubbish chunk of rubber ever attached to a wheel.
That way everyone would still be in the same boat, any considerations about Tyres wearing would be removed from the conversation (both literally and metaphorically) and the cars would be so ugly to drive that the racing would be hugely entertaining for us watching on the outside, if not for those behind the wheel. Come to think of it, perhaps the solution isn’t so hard after all?
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