Pirelli has revealed the 1800 tyres that were expected to be used at the Australian Grand Prix will have a surprising second use in the UK.
The first race of 2020 was called off less than two hours before the first practice was set to begin on Friday, following a positive Coronavirus test for a McLaren employee late on Thursday.
While at the F1 teams, the cancellation meant the simple but arduous task of repacking the cars, garage, hospitality and other infrastructure needed at a Grand Prix to return home, for Pirelli, a whole weekend’s worth of rubber was lost and will now be repurposed.
“We crush the tyres in order to fit them in fewer containers and send them back to the UK where we recycle them in a cement factory close to Didcot,” Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola told Motorsport.
“We burn them at high temperature, and we create energy, but not pollution.
“We are investigating many possible ways for recycling F1 tyres, but at the moment this is the way we recycle them after all our analysis.”
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The number of wasted tyres after a Grand Prix might surprise some, with all intermediates and wets destroyed along with the slicks that teams don’t use.
And that begs the question why Pirelli can’t just store that rubber for another race?
“At the moment the limitation is that when we strip a tyre from the rim, we give a stress to the bead, and then obviously we are not confident to fit the tyre again because of the level of forces acting on these tyres is huge. So we don’t want to take any risk,” Isola explained.
“For the European events we can carry them over because if we don’t use them we keep them fitted, and we load our trucks with tyres and rims.
“In the future, and considering that we will have a sole supplier and standard design for the rims, we will try to work together in order to find a way to fit and strip tyres and re-use them, but we need to make sure that we are not taking any risk.”
Tyres have also arrived at the next two Grand Prix’s which won’t take place, but because they’ve yet to be fitted to the rims, they are free to be used should F1 visit later in the year.
“The tyres for Bahrain and Vietnam are already there, but it’s not a problem. We use sea freight for most of the tyres and they are in thermal controlled containers,” said the Pirelli chief.
“It’s like having them in a warehouse, it doesn’t make any difference for them. If there is any change in the calendar we can use them.
“The only problem is for tyres that are already fitted because in that case those tyres are going to be stripped.”