Rumblings

Whether on racetrack or highways heavy cars take their toll on tyres. It's an eco crisis, says DOUG NYE. FCEVs offer a way forward

- By DOUG NYE

Not too far into the Austrian GP at the hilly Red Bull Ring, it was noticeable how many rolls of tread-compound 'rubber' had already been ground off the incredibly fast but amazingly hefty competing cars' tyres. Of course such offline 'marbles' are a common sight. Most enthusiasts never even give them a passing thought, unless some superstar gets off onto them, slithers off circuit and eventually finds something hard to hit.

Generally, the marbles accumulate around every circuit through a lengthy, flat-out race, and only a small percentage will ever be squeegeed up by the worn tyres of the finishers as they seek to pick up a safety margin of additional weight in case post-race scrutineering proves uncomfortably tight.

Studying those marbles and thinking about the accumulation one can also see in the gutters of any public road today, reminds me of a daunting pollution statistic I'd only recently learned. I'm not particularly a so-called greenie, but according to Friends of the Earth the UK dumps some 19,000 tons of 'tyre fragments' into our waterways each year, simply rain-washed there via the roadside drains. That drain-wash then accounts for some 30% of all microplastics polluting the world's oceans. Other sources claim 78%, and six million tons per year...