Quote:
Originally Posted by BENZ-LGB
Thanks for the info. I had suspected that the weaving is to keep the tires nice and warm (and grippy!).
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Not warm for just mechanical grip, but also for aerodynamic grip. When the tires get cold they loose air pressure. When that happens the tire gets soft and the ride height drops. The ride height is crucial because you need to have airflow under the car in order to have downforce but if the car is set too high, then you get too much drag. The loss of ride height due to lost air pressure is often enough to have a huge impact on downforce.
This was considered to be one of the contributing factors to Ayrton Senna's death at Imola in 1993. You can actually see him coming up alongside the safety car urging the driver to pick up the pace because he wasn't going fast enough for the pack of F1 cars behind him. When the race started again he didn't have full air pressure, which means he didn't have full ride height. When he hit a bump the car bottomed out, causing a loss of downforce and he was unable to control the car. He hit the wall and died.