An embedded acquisition system for remote monitoring of tire status in F1 race cars through thermal images

One of the most critical performance factors for race car is tires management. In particular, the main factor which provides information about the workload of tires is the temperature. Until now, the race engineer’s knowledge of how the tires performed has traditionally been limited to temperature readings, manually taken when the car returns to the pits. It does not provide the engineer with any real idea about how the tires are working at a specific part of the track on any specific lap. Having a better knowledge about how the tires work could offer an important advantage that allows to get to extremely pointy set­ups. To optimize the tire use, a more accurate way of monitoring their temperatures is presented: in this paper we introduce a new approach to study the tire temperature that use an infrared camera to effectively know how it evolves.