Will F1 Wheels and Tires Help a Regular Sports Car Perform Better on the Track?

As you can imagine, this is easier written than done, as fitting 13-inch wheels to a modern car is not easy, as few vehicles have brakes that are small enough to fit the 13-inch wheels. Even then, the wheel hub requires a custom adapter to make the center-lock wheels fit.

Even still, there is yet another problem, as installing these wheels and tires in a normal vehicle is not ideal, as they will not fit like normal tires in the wheel wells, since they are wider than normal road-going tires.

For the sake of the entire experiment, Scott Mansell went ahead and found the only rear-mid-engined vehicle that can fit wheels that are this small.

The installation was not straightforward at all, and it involved irreversible changes to the vehicle, as well as machining custom parts. In total, the team spent almost twice what was paid for the vehicle just to get everything ready for the shot.

Now, after such expenditure, as well as effort, one would expect that fitting F1 wheels and tires on a car would bring dramatic improvements in grip, which would result in a visible performance improvement. In theory, yes, but things work differently in the real world, especially after you take everything into account.

The biggest issue with Formula 1 tires is that they require a certain temperature range to operate at their optimum performance. If they get too hot or too cold, all their grip goes away like a beautiful dream when the alarm clock goes off.

Even with experience and talent, keeping a vehicle on the track with cold F1 tires is a near-impossible feat. Here is how things went for Driver61, Scott Mansell, in a Toyota MR2.