Yahoo Autos Racing Teams Caught Using Illegal Sunlight
Oh sun, you heavenly orb. How bitterly do I scorn you, blaring down on me in the middle of a dry summer day. And how deeply I yearn for you in the dark days of winter. Oh sun, how cruelly we vacillate, when it is your power that remains a constant. Such is the plight of DTM racing team Abt, which is now accusing its rivals in the series of illegally heating up their tires using sunlight.
The basics of the drama is that DTM, the German touring car championship, made it illegal to use tire blankets to warm up tires before racing. The idea is to save on energy consumption, cost, and complexity. DTM isn't the only series to do it. There are no tire warmers in IndyCar, F1 doesn't use them for wet tires (and keeps debating an outright ban), and teams at the Spa 24 Hours had to deal with the same restriction this year, too.
The thing is that tires want to be warmed up before you start racing on them. Tires operate best when they are up to temperature, and that first period of driving on cold tires is tricky, if not dangerous.
The workaround? Leave your tires in the sun, as Motorsports.com reports:
According to Motorsport.com’s sister website Motorsport-Total.com, several teams have been found leaving the garage doors wide open and placing tyres in a way to take advantage of direct sunlight.
Teams also appear to have used tyre tents to heat up the Pirelli rubber. Some outfits use a black tarpaulin for this purpose, which can store more heat in direct sunlight than a white-coloured tent.
Another clever trick involves teams placing tyres early on the grid trolley, which happens to be positioned in the sun outside the pit.
DTM issued a clarification that teams are not allowed to leave their tires in the sun at all, for fear of creating an unfair advantage, with the exception of wheeling tires out onto the grid. The series notes that "teams are therefore obliged to make every effort to protect the wheels from sunlight."
This is surely my favorite rule-bending controversy in racing as of late. There is no trick device, no flexible wing, no nothing. It's just the sun. That's it! The margins of racing, the fine line of what constitutes that unfair advantage, is so slim.
Vile sun! How bitterly we oppose you! How greedily we steal shade in every moment of excessive heat. And yet how deeply do we yearn for your warmth in our cold hours, how we long for you when you are not there.
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