New rain tire will gain traction with teams

Via IndyCar.com

Spectators, TV viewers and Verizon IndyCar Series teams will be able to better distinguish which cars are running Firestone Racing’s new rain tire by its silver stripe, which complements the red stripe on the alternate tires for road and street courses.

The rain tires will be available this weekend at the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio.

Beyond the packaging, the year-long development process utilized state-of-the-art technologies to meet the goals of safety, reliability and raceability on a variety of wet surfaces. The tread pattern and tread depth are the same as the previous rain tires introduced in July 2014.

“There are a lot of things we’re doing behind the scenes to make sure we’re putting the best possible product on the racetrack. For the first time, we used a lot of our company’s internal tools to look at the compound on a small scale,” said Dale Harrigle, chief engineer for Bridgestone America’s Motorsports and manager of race tire development.

Experimental compounds were run through a wet friction test to evaluate which had the most wet traction. Then a handful of tires were built and taken to Bridgestone’s proving grounds in Texas for wet traction testing in addition to “other machines in-house that we can run full-size tires on to evaluate wet traction,” Harrigle said.

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