Bridgestone produces snow tyres for F1

Bridgestone Motorsport has produced a special Limited Edition F1 Potenza Snow Tyre at the request of the BMW Sauber F1 Team. The team will be holding a demonstration of at the prestigious White Turf horse racing event in the Swiss resort town of St. Mortiz, and special tyres are required due to the extreme conditions in which the BMW Sauber F1.06 will run.

The F1 snow tyres, produced by Bridgestone Motorsport’s Technical Centre in Tokyo, feature 420 studs on each of the front tyres and 588 studs on each rear tyre. It took two Bridgestone technicians over 16 hours to manually insert all 2,016 studs into the double layer of tread compound on one set of tyres alone.

The tyre studs are constructed from tungsten and embedded within aluminium casings. They have been designed to provide additional grip on ice and hard-packed snow, the anticipated conditions at the event – overnight temperatures in the resort town have recently been dropping to approximately minus 15 degrees Celsius.

While tyremakers usually boast of using technology originally developed for F1 in their road car tyres, this time the trend has been reversed. Bridgestone has used its knowledge winter car tyre treads and compounds in the production of the Potenza F1 extreme weather tyres. Bridgestone’s Noranza studded tyre was reportedly used as inspiration for the design of the F1 tyre.