Which brings me to a point that seems overlooked in discussions about tire wear rates. They look at it in terms of how long you can run to reduce a tire to zero, but in real life nobody runs a tire to zero. Hypothetically, zero represents the point where your tires officially fail structurally, as in flying apart or whatever and no longer functioning as a tire.
In the movie Cars, Lightning McQueen experienced tire wear reducing his tires to zero on the final lap, resulting in a catastrophic tire failure and running on rims, and I pointed out to my wife that no driver would run a tire down that far because his lap times would be so terrible long before that point that he wouldn't be able to resist a tire change. Nobody ever runs a tire down to the rims in racing, ever.
I don't know what percentage you might figure to be the amount of wear that tires normally get changed, but from my experience watching F1 faithfully for the past several years I know that even if a driver runs a set of tires far longer than they were expected to reasonably last they're still far from complete failure. They may have far exceeded the range wherein they produce decent lap times, but they're far from completely falling apart, although they may be referred to as being in relatively horrible shape (relative to what you'd normally run them to). So, you might figure that they might swap them at something like 40% wear, and if you really want to push it run them farther to maybe 60%, but nobody ever runs them to the rims.
Now this year the FIA wanted the Pirelli tires to be deliberately frail, falling apart more rapidly than the Bridgestones were before, but this new and horrible rate of tire wear seen in the 2011 F1 season aren't indicative of what a tire should really run. Looking to previous years before the tires were artificially made flimsy, it was fully possible to run an entire race on a single set of tires, and there were times that we saw exactly that, with a tire change at the start or at the end to comply with the regulations that demand a compound change during the race. Here we're talking maybe 90 minutes on a single set of tires, and this isn't reducing them to nothing but rather they were still in decent condition (maybe 50%) at the end of 90 minutes. We're not talking about running these on a Prius, either, but a friggin' Formula One car.
Granted, Turn 10's tire data collaboration was with Pirelli, but that doesn't mean they intended to duplicate the deliberately high tire wear rates seen in the current F1 season.
) what I'm asking is has anyone taken a car over the hour mark and what has their experience been. I haven't driven any races yet over an hour. Like you said, in FM3 at the 45 minute mark fuel was about gone and tires were fading on you.
