Competition Remains Central for Michelin

The news that Michelin has bowed out of MotoGP, after walking away from Formula 1 and WRC in the last few years, just goes to show how seriously the French tyre manufacturer takes motorsport. Competition and, of course, winning is a central tenet of the French manufacturer’s thinking when it comes to racing. Tyres & Accessories visited Silverstone at the culmination of the 2008 Le Mans series and met with Michelin competition manager (four-wheel activities) Matthieu Bonardel. Exhilarating bike series like MotoGP may not be in his remit, but when it comes to four-wheel motorsport, racing means business.

Nowhere is the competition philosophy more apparent than in the endurance racing series Michelin has dominated in recent years. After 4000km of competing on Europe’s finest circuits (including Barcelona, Monza, Spa and the Nurburgring) Silverstone hosted the final race of the 2008 Le Mans Series which also turned out to be the championship decider. Automatic entry into the 2009 Le Mans 24 hours was available to the top two in each category – and it showed. This year’s Silverstone event was as exciting as anyone could have hoped for with Le Mans Series organisers hailing the event as “the greatest race in the series’ history” with record crowds to boot. The end result was that after five hours of racing, Michelin-shod Audis achieved surprise wins in both the drivers’ and championship titles.

Michelin will no doubt be pleased that this year’s Le Mans series was so exciting. But a close finish like this only highlights how tyre selection can make a world of difference. Just 48 hours before the Le Mans Series reached its climax at Silverstone, Michelin showed T&A the lengths teams go to when it comes to selecting the right tyres and compound.

Michelin’s competition tyre “demonstration” meant being strapped into a Corvette C6R and taking Silverstone’s corners at break-neck speed, while attempting to simultaneously hold onto lunch and keep an eye on the telemetry set-up. After two comparative sets of three laps with different compound configurations in each, it was clear that using the soft compound on the front axle and the hard tyres on the rear was, subjectively, the best set-up. With hard tyres all round there was noticeably less traction requiring more over-steer from the driver and resulting in a slower corner. But here is the key point: teams like Luc Alphand Aventures Corvette don’t make their tyre and engineering decisions on subjective opinions alone.

That’s where the technology comes in. The equipment teams use to evaluate tyre performance is based on a GPS system wired up to sensors measuring G-force – in other words satnav with bells on. All this data is stored in a common or garden SD memory card and the fed into a computer for analysis. The resulting data showed the kind of accuracy that it would be impossible to “feel.” The two set ups produced an average difference in lateral acceleration of 0.4G when cornering, which resulted in a roughly two second difference in lap time. In short, the difference between winning and losing a race.

To put the scale of and event like the Le Mans Series into perspective, Michelin took around 2700 soft, medium and hard, standard, intermediate and wet tyres to Silverstone in September. All of these are inflated to condition specific air pressures (1.4 bar for slicks; 1.8 bar for wet and intermediate tyres) and all the front tyre/wheel assemblies are balanced. According to the technicians the tyres produced are so uniform that balancing is not always necessary, however, when this is required the tyre tech tent is on hand to apply the necessary weights, using the kind of Corghi tyre changing and balancing machinery that you might find in any number of high-performance tyre dealers across the UK. In the interests of fairness, each Michelin-equipped Le Mans Series team has its own technician and everyone draws from the same pool of tyres.