By Larry Edsall
AKRON, Ohio -- What does it take to make a tire for a Sprint Cup race car?
Well there is natural and synthetic rubber, fillers such as carbon black, zinc oxide, reactive resins, oil, fatty acids, antioxidants, tack and traction resins, wax and accelerants.
In all, there are 49 chemical components as well as fabric and wire.
And a liner, toe guard, first and second plies, an apex, flipper and beads, first and second belts, overlay, sidewalls and, of course, the tread -- which is only one-tenth of an inch (2.5 millimeters for our Canadian friends) thick.
One-tenth of one inch. That?s not very thick. Maybe as thick as, say, 18 sheets of copy paper. Wow: My computer mouse rides on a thicker slab of rubber than a NASCAR race car.
I know these things because a week or so ago, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company introduced its new, second-generation Assurance TripleTred All-Season tire with ?evolving traction grooves? technology. Our day-long visit to Akron included time at the Goodyear test track at the wheel of vehicles equipped with the new tire, a ride in one of the Goodyear blimps, and a tour of the plant where Goodyear constructs its racing tires -- for NASCAR and short-track stock car racing, for drag racing, for World of Outlaws, for sports car racing and even street-legal tire primarily designed, however, for track-day exercises.
Goodyear is the exclusive tire supplier to NASCAR, which means that for each Sprint Cup event it has to produce between 1,200 and 1,400 tires, each tire optimally designed to wear through its tread while the car burns through a tank of fuel.
Teams are allowed to purchase five sets of tires for practice and qualifying, and may use nine to a dozen more during the race. And if you think replacing the tires on your minivan is expensive, consider that each Sprint Cup tire costs $459.
Hmm, I wonder if teams that do two-tire changes are more worried about gaining track position or saving nearly a thousand dollars.
Goodyear typically works six weeks ahead of the NASCAR schedule, and it doesn?t try to get a jump-start on next year because even a 1-degree change in the rules governing rear spoiler angle would necessitate engineering a completely new tire for each track.
Speaking of tracks, Goodyear is able to use the similarities between some tracks to divide them into seven categories. While each track gets a unique tire, there are similarities in the creation of the tires, say, used at Indianapolis, Pocono and -- believe it or not -- at Bristol.
As you might expect, Daytona and Talladega comprise a group, as do Charlotte, Chicago, Darlington, Homestead, Las Vegas and Texas.
Only one track is a group unto itself. Know which one? It?s Martinsville, that uniquely paperclip-shaped circuit.
But when Goodyear tire producers talk about ?calendar,? they?re not talking about the schedule, but about the creation of the rubber-coated fabric used in a tire. Nor is the ?windup? a baseball term to these folks; but has to with the humidity, temperature and testing that goes on in the lab before that fabric is used to create a tire.
NASCAR tires are built by hand, and the tire builder?s name goes into each tire.
After a tire is built, it goes into a mold where it is baked under high pressure (vulcanized). The mold also impressed words and codes into the tire?s sidewalls. After cooling, each tire is weighed, scanned, undergoes Xray and laser testing.
Speaking of codes, the sticker on a new tire includes an eight-digit barcode identifier, a spring rate number, tire diameter, tread width and beat diameter, a product code, tire classification, mold, construction and compound combination and a production sequence number.
Each tire also gets marked after inspection and two colored dots are positioned to indicate optimal mounting match position for the tire and its wheel.
By the way, the Goodyear racing tire facility is a zero-landfill factory. Any scrap is sold for use by other companies.
Read more from Larry at www.izoom.com
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