Tire warmers to stay in F1 for one more year

The FIA have decided to keep tire warmers in Formula 1 for one more year. The original plan was for tire warmers to be banned after the 2008 season, but with slick tires being introduced next year the FIA decided to change their mind and give help the teams cut costs and be able to race competitively and calm fears about the amount of crashes happening on cold tires. Though Bridgestone, which supplies the F1 teams with tires, has opposed a keeping tire warmers saying that the rubber should be strong enough to not have so many crashes.

One option that has been suggested to substitute tire warmers is that of introducing a minimum tire pressure rule, but Honda boss Ross Brawn and quite a few others think that enforcing the rule will be impossible. Brawn had this to say to autosport.com during a recent interview: "You can run tyres for sure without blankets, lot of formulae do, but we are a particularly competitive formula and if you don't run blankets with tyres you need to have a minimum pressure control."

"We haven't worked out how to do that and that was the big concern � how to introduce it fairly and effectively for all the teams? And how do you avoid the massive overhead of policing it?"

"The TWG (Technical Working Group) said it wanted to keep tyre blankets because it could not see a solution to controlling minimum tyre pressure, and that was a big worry. So the option of having blankets was the easiest. And interestingly tyre blankets are not prohibited in testing, so for efficiency of testing we will almost certainly be using tyre blankets in testing. So we will have had them in testing and not racing."

FIA scraps plans to ban tyre warmers [Autosport.com]