Why don't F1 teams make their own tires?

At first this may seem like an absurd question. If you think about though, there could be advantages. Imagine the Michelin teams racing at Indy this year, any of the big-budget teams could have controlled their own destiny and actually raced if they had made their own tires. Obviously there are hurdles which must be overcame to succeed making your own tires.

Capital Equipment: Machines to apply belting, rubberized cord, and ply layers. Curing pots to vulcanize the green tire. Testing equipment. A small facility to produce perhaps 2000 tires per year (enough to supply two or three cars per season). Estimated (one-time) cost = $30M

Materials & Labor: For a year, just an estimate to employ an additional 20 people and buy materials to produce the 2000 tires...$4M (or $2000/tire)

Logistics: Additional costs associated with transporting the tires to each race or test...$1M. Most of that would be travel expenses for the tire engineers, shipping the tires would not be a big expense.

Engineering Expertise: This is the one which is difficult to assign a price per year. Assembling a team of top tire gurus would be expensive but required. Suffice to say that eight top designers, at $500k/yr, would be $4M.

So, for $39M the first year and $9M after that, a team could design and build tires specifically for their car, for specific tracks, and control their own destiny. Considering the budgets of Ferrari, Toyota, Honda, etc, this is chicken feed.

Opinions?

 

That is basically the situation now. There is an ideal balance of compound and construction for every track, for given weather conditions. The ideal tire for Malaysia in May is not the same as Spa in September. The C & C of the tires are tweaked for each track in hopes of finding the ideal "sweet spot" in tire performance.

Goodyear even did this when they were the sole supplier. Certainly Michelin and Bridgestone do now that there is competition. Supplying many less tires per weekend with the new rules would also enable quick changes to C & C every two weeks between races.

With respect to Ferrari and Bridgestone, it does certainly look in hindsight that they dissuaded Bridgestone from supplying another competitive team. If Ferrari made their own tires, they could control the tires, which is perhaps the most important single factor in modern F1 performance.

Imagine the PR value as well of having a car 100% Ferrari winning. No sharing credit with Bridgestone.