Tom Cruise at Miami GP 2023
Tom Cruise was in attendance at last weekend’s Miami Grand Prix in the United States – he even changed the tire of an F1 car.
Tom Cruise wasn’t just in attendance at last week’s Miami GP but he also got a first-hand experience of how things work in the F1 paddock including how to change an F1 tire. The veteran actor is friends with a lot of F1 drivers including Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton drives for Mercedes and the F1 team invited Cruise and gave him the opportunity to try his hand at changing one of their car’s tires.
A footage of Cruise changing a Mercedes car’s tire has gone viral on social media. Reactions have poured in from fans across various social media platforms. Let us take a look at some of those reactions.
F1 tires need to be handled with utmost care and non-professionals are generally allowed to handle them. F1 teams are very particular about their tires and each team uses customised tires which suit their requirements. The tires used in F1 cars are completely different to normal car tires and bear only a superficial similarity.
F1 teams choose tires based on the weather conditions like wet tires when it’s raining or if the race is taking place on a wet track. The other two variants of tires that F1 teams use are the hard tires and the soft tires.
Due to their immense importance, F1 tires are designed and manufactured by experts and limited specialist companies like Pirelli. They are quite costly and a single set of F1 tires costs about US $2700. It is estimated that each team spends about $35,100 worth of tires in each Grand Prix. There are 23-24 races that take place in a regular F1 season. This implies that the cost of tires for an F1 vehicle is a staggering US$ 807,300 per driver in a season. With two cars per team, the cost of F1 tires accumulates to around $1,614,600 for every team in a season.
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