The spectacular night race in Singapore returned on the weekend allowing Formula 1 cars to race around its track, made out of the streets of Singapore. Tyres played an interesting role in the storyline but it was interesting to see their durability and how tyre information is read through telemetry by the teams.

The tyre strategy in this race wasn’t as big an issue before hand as the track didn’t seem to provide as much tyre degradation as other races like Canada. However, it still played a big part early on as Formula One drivers have to race on at least two different compounds – referred to as the soft, medium, and hard compound tyres. This requires at least one pit-stop to be made and as the safety car came out due to an early incident, many of the field decided to pit apart from the leaders but one did – Mark Webber.

The drivers who pitted had to remain on the that compound throughout the rest of the race and hope their performance would remain otherwise they would lose too much time. In the early stages the softer compound tyre was the fastest but eventually – due to various changing conditions – the hard and medium compound tyres came to life and became the faster tyre. It came too late for Hamilton as he came out of the pits behind Webber but the front two of Alonso and Vettel were setting blistering lap times and well out ahead.

As another safety car period came to a close Hamilton tried to overtake Webber but they collided in what was described as a racing incident. Webber’s front right tyre hit Hamilton’s left rear and he was out of the race due to suspension and tyre damage. Webber appeared to be alright until the end of the race but Bridgestone showed how his tyre was hanging on the rim by 5mm. It was very unsafe and “extraordinarily lucky” that he managed to continue without his tyre blowing and discarding from the rim. A tyre needs its rim as it gives structure to the rubber tyre, its been around since the 1900′s.

Hirohide Hamashima, director of motorsport tyres development for Bridgestone, said: “Today we saw another very exciting race.

“It was the first time this weekend that we had a completely dry track so there was a lot of track surface evolution. This made the strategies very interesting as we were all watching very closely to see how both compounds would perform.

“We could certainly see differences with tyre wear and degradation from different cars, car set-ups and driving styles.

“Both Fernando and Sebastian managed their tyres very well with very similar strategies meaning a very close battle between them for the entire race. Mark showed the durability of the medium compound by completing almost all of the race distance on the same set of tyres.

“Not only did Mark’s tyres continue to deliver strong performance, but they also withstood the contact with Lewis. In this contact the front right tyre sidewall was pushed out of alignment with the rim, yet it retained its inner pressure for the rest of the race.

Perhaps this is just a case of how far tyre development and durability has come along in the history of tyre development. It was also interesting that Red Bull were able to monitor these events and manage circumstances. All teams are well capable of checking tyre pressures and reading telemetry from the car to understand if there are any underlying issues – for sure Webber felt vibrations from his tyre but was crucially able to continue.

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4. What is the difference between Dry Tyres and Wet Tyres?
5. Pirelli begin tyre testing for new F1 season