I had a nail in my daily commuters tire yesterday, so I ran over to our local tire and wheel shop called Brodies. I guess they specialize in Firestone tires, because they had a big semi truck there with a Mario Andretti Formula One race car, and a race car simulator.
So while the tire was getting fixed I chatted with one of the Firestone guys, who was telling me about the Formula One car. I guess it was one of Andettti's training cars, minus the engine.
Here's the interesting part...the engines are leased to the race car team by either Honda or GMC. Since the car wasn't racing, they get the engine back. Now for the real wild stuff, the tires are leased from Firestone to the race team. I thought what? He said each tire is bar coded to each driver and race. The temperatures it reaches as well as tread wear, and other technical stuff is all recorded and analyzed. Each tire has only 3/32" rubber, so running diagonaly across the smooth surface are these little circles to measure tire tread left. He said at each race the Firestone team changes out the tires, not the crew. Pretty interesting stuff.