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CORVETTE TODAY #118-Conversation w/Lead Engineers From Michelin & Their Relationship With Corvette
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May 8, 2025
Tires on your Corvette play a huge, major role in the performance of the car. In this episode of CORVETTE TODAY, your host, Steve Garrett, talks with the two lead engineers that work and design tires for America's Sports Car. You'll hear from Lee Willard and Dr. Jeff Anderson about how Michelin designs and develops tires, how they "got in the door" with Chevrolet and Corvette along with their role with Corvette Racing. Both of these men are thrilled to be on CORVETTE TODAY! You'll truly enjoy listening and hearing their stories.
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[Music] welcome to corvette today the podcast
0:06
that talks about everything corvette with your host steve garrett mc and dj at one of the largest corvette weekends
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in the country corvette fun fest president of the corvette club of kansas city missouri and radio disc jockey at
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the number one radio station in kansas city for over 40 years here's steve garrett
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[Music] thanks for listening to corvette today
0:30
the podcast that talks about everything corvette brought to you by wheelcraft want to dress up your corvette with
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bright chrome or black chrome wheels visit wheelcraft.com to learn about their advanced pvd chrome finishing they
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can refinish your wheels or offer a wheel exchange for most models and it comes with a five year warranty visit
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wheelcraft.com today or call 833-840-5334
0:52
i'm your host steve garrett i appreciate you tuning in you can listen to corvette today on all podcast platforms you can
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fellow corvette enthusiasts like yourself at mid-engine corvette forum dot com also a shout out to
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canadiancorvetforum.com welcoming corvette owners from around the world michelin is the world's leading tire
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manufacturer and in the past michelin has worked with corvette on the 2009 zr1
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and the 2011 z06 but in 2013 michelin was named as the exclusive original
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equipment tire for corvette starting with the c7 now if you've ever been to the national corvette museum's michelin
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bash and attend to the michelin seminars you're going to know my two guests on today's show i'm so excited to have on
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corvette today lee willard the engineer for michelin and dr jeff anderson the
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product development engineer for michelin we're going to be talking about some tires today on corvette today guys
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welcome to the show hey steve so great to be here on corvette today it's exciting i guess i couldn't be more
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pumped than to sit here and do this well guys first off let's do an introduction for both you lee and you too dr jeff
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tell me about your upbringing your family your education and how you got to michelin lee why don't you start off oh
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that's made me go way back in time because i'm 37 years with michelin now i started in 1986 but i'm a carolina boy i
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was born and mostly raised in north carolina and i went to nc state studied
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mechanical engineering i got a bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineering specializing in
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energy and heat transfer thermodynamics after i finished my masters i started interviewing and interviewed with
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michelin and just was so impressed with the technology and and the goals that were being applied for modeling and
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computer simulation of tires that i said hey this is the place for me and i took the job at michelin and 37 years later
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here you are still right still here just pushing 60 this year so it's been a
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wonderful ride that's fantastic dr jeff give us background on you and how you got to michelin as well yeah so i grew
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up just north of new orleans in mandeville louisiana i've always been a car guy specifically a corvette guy my
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uncle was always in the camaros and he had 269s and when we talked about those cars he goes yeah i always wanted a
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corvette though that set me on the path and when i was 17 i saved up every summer working at a concession stand and
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bought a 94 corvette which i drove my senior year in high school and i loved every bit of that car so i've always
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been around that and wanting to push my career that way i ended up going to louisiana tech for undergraduate studies
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and i got a bachelor's in mechanical engineering when it came time to figure out what i wanted to do i ended up out
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at clemson in south carolina to further and get a master's degree i met my wife while i was at clemson settled down and
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had a wonderful job offer at michelin and decided to go to work there as soon as i found out we were working on
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corvette i got to meet lee and man it has been a fun ride ever since couldn't be happier and learning from the best
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that's fantastic guys you know i guess we would be remiss if we didn't talk about michelin and the company's history
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give us a little bit of background on how michelin got to be where it is today this one was founded in 1889 by the
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michelin brothers the company started by making a improvement in bicycle tires
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back in the 1800s bicycles were the top-notch performance vehicle out
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there besides maybe a fast horse bicycle tires were glued onto rims and michelin
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brothers came up with a new design where you could attach a tire and d mounted tire without having to use glue and
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waiting for the glue to dry that was the advent of this one that started in 1889
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if you go across the history of the company one of the most notable innovations in michelin's history is the
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invention of the radial tire and that was 1946 right after world war ii and
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then you saw gradual taking over the market or conquering the market moving
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from biased tires to radial tires through the 60s and 70s and michelin
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moved headquarters in north america in the late 70s and opened up our research
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center here in greenville south carolina lee that's really cool talk a little bit more about the more recent history for
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michelin then recent history from michigan i think where i can give you some maybe a little bit of insight into
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michelin and north america like i said we have our research center started here in the 70s and we were mainly
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concentrated on truck tires all season tires normal typical mass production
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commuting vehicles type cars sedans minivans that was all work in the 70s
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and 80s but later on in the 80s and moving into the 90s we started to work on our first ultra high performance
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tires those were sports car tires before that in the 60s 70s and 80s a lot of the
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sport car tires were all designed and manufactured in europe and they had very
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much a european focus so car companies like porsche ferrari bmw motorsports the
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sports car knowledge at michelin design focus was mainly on european cars that
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was one of the interesting changes in michelin in our history for north america that eventually led up to the
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corvette was that we started to do high performance cars right here in north america and that was something i was
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going to ask you what significant advances were made at michelin that led you to working with corvette the biggest
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advances that came about at michelin that helped us to work with corvette first of all it's just our philosophy of
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how we enter into motorsports to learn about the conditions and all the
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different type of conditions that tire can be subjected to when used in a very performant way so for example hard
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braking hard acceleration hard chlorine high temperatures endurance making sure
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the tires don't fall apart make sure they don't get too hot and lose grip and control one of the big things that helps
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us to work with corvette corvette being a sports car tire i've heard people say that every corvette is a race car the
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fact that we put so much investment in people and technology into motorsports
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allowed us to learn a lot of things that would eventually be brought to the table for when we started to design tires for
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corvette and to compete with other tire manufacturers to even be considered to make tires for corvette that was one big
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area another big area was the c3m process the c3m process is a highly
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automated almost 100 automated very flexible high technology manufacturing
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process what that process brings to us and developing tires from corvette is
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flexibility to be innovative it was really key and important for us to win
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the contracts with corvette to be able to out innovate everyone else on the playing field we need to have new tires
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with new innovations which would meet higher levels of performance and talk about some of those recent innovations
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lee and jeff that really set michelin apart a big innovation is taking the
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same type of rubbers that are designed for the track and for competition and being able to modify the rubber and the
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structure of the tire to be applicable to a street tire those innovations not only are rubber compounding but they're
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also in the composite of the tire so the belt packages the side walls and when
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you talk about recent innovations just talk about run flat all corvettes have run flat tires corvette was one of the
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first manufacturers to embrace run flat tires on a wide scale with the 1994
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corvette c4 is that right jeff was it 94 did your c4 have run flat on it no i
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think it was 95. mine had a spare tire okay so 95 yes that is the fact that corvette
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decided to remove that spare tire and incorporating a run flat capability within the tires that are already on
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four corners of the car is the innovation that we took and ran with we said how can we not only provide run
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flat to the car but also be able to afford other kinds of performances like better cornering better braking higher
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grip that's a great example of a recent innovation that started in the mid 90s i know corvette leads in that innovation
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yeah it was really a big deal when we had run flat tires because it scared a lot of people not having a spare tire in
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the car so it was really cool when michelin came out with those run flats that's for sure yeah it sure was and the
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early run flights on corvettes were very stiff they compromised ride what we've
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done at michelin is work around all those compromises to improve all the
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normal performances of those tires but also to emphasize and highlight the
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great handling performances you can get with those kinds of structures that sounds good well guys let's take our
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first break when we come back we're going to talk more specifically about the marriage between michelin and
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corvette we've got lee willard engineer from michelin and dr jeff anderson the product development engineer for
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this is the corvette today podcast with steve garrett hey thanks for listening and watching
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call them at 833-840-5334 i'm your host steve garrett with me
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today is lee willard and dr jeff anderson from michelin in this second segment of corvette today we're going to
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talk about how michelin started working with corvette guys give me the back story on that because that has to be a
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fantastic story yes that is a fantastic story i'll admit i'm selfish i always
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wanted to work on corvette tires so whenever we saw the chance we never had a chance to design a tire that could go
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on a corvette even before we had a commercial relationship with corvette to develop the tires i would always push my
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boss said hey let me work on that i got some ideas for that this first came about when corvette was starting to
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think about having run flat tires in the early 90s we didn't actually build tires
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for the mid 90s corvettes which were run flat another tire company did but we were working on that as a research
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project and me and being a young guy a lot of good computer skills just like dr
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jeff has right now i was working on that research project and we built some tires internally at michelin to try out to see
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how good we could do it at this new idea of run flat so after those preliminary internal investigation very much r d
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skunk work projects we built some tires for corvette that were run flat that worked very well in the middle 90s
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michelin built a c3m factory in north america in the united states here in
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greenville south carolina and i was transferred to that group we thought of the idea like hey let's make us some
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all-season tires for the corvette c5s and see how that goes in the marketplace
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so we designed the first all-season tires not for original equipment but for
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replacement market and built them in our new c3m factory in greenville south carolina we didn't do any advertising
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didn't really tell anybody but through internet or corvette forums or just word of mouth that corvette closed people
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said hey have you seen these new michelin run flat tires they're all seasoned and run flat and they fit your
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corvette that market started to grow like crazy because people were taking our tires and comparing them to the
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original equipment tires i said hey this gives us everything we want more let's get these tires so that was a
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replacement market we got our foot in the door in the replacement market or aftermarket with corvette with that
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little project later on because of our work in racing at le mans and american
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le mans corvette racing found out that they could go two or three seconds a lot faster jeff
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was that what it was it was significant it was enough they couldn't ignore it anymore yeah they
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could not ignore the time differential at le mans in 2003 and corvette switched
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to michelin racing tires in 2004 and they won le mans that year if i remember
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properly corvette came in second and third against the ferrari they had michelin tires the year before corvette
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switched off our competitors tires to michelin tires and they handled we won the 2004 le mans so that was another big
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factor in helping us become original equipment on corvette the last thing
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that happened is because of the racing experience general motors invited us to
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have a shootout to compete for the c6 zr1 and that was about 2007 2008 a
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shootout is a do or die situation you got to bring your best so it's like an innovation war so the fact that i've
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been working in our most innovative tire factory along with a lot of other really good guys at michelin we put our heads
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together and came up with some really great ideas for a shootout tire that got us on the c6 zr1 for model year 2009.
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that was the opening of all the rest and the rest is history right guys the rest is history we did go through
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another competitive shootout for c7 fitments and we won that both for the
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narrow body and the wide body and now you see us on the c8 and jeff and i are both still innovating as fast as we can
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with all our capabilities i've been proud to hold 100 oe fitment on the corvette currently absolutely and you
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know guys you're right the run flat all-season tires was a huge innovation i remember that and switched my corvette
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to that as well and dr jeff you were kind of doing double duty because you were working on c7 and c8 plus you were
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earning your phd isn't that right i did so i got to michelin in 2010 and lee had
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done so much of this awesome stuff my path was a little different and there was an opportunity for me to go back to
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school and earn a phd to michelin allowed me to do that and gave me time and resources to work on that but i
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still held some of my corvette responsibilities it was amazing to get to work on c7 and c8 while doing a phd
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and my studies were very tied into it i ended up studying lap time simulation and driver modeling as my dissertation
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topic so it all segued in really well while doing the phd i remember telling my professor i'm going to need to take
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five weeks out of the country to go and work the 24 hours of le mans and then get to the nurburgring right after so
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that was a highlight of running simulations for my phd over in france and germany that's incredible did you
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get any sleep during that time at all [Laughter]
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for about 10 minutes during le mans we're sitting side by side with both our computers and just says i got to take a
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nap and he put his head down 10 minutes what was that the 2017
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yeah it was 2017. the only picture i got is me my head down on the desk for the 10 minutes i slept that night that's
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funny and we're going to talk more specifically about le mans in the third segment guys talk about some of the
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significant developments of run flat tires how did they come to being one of the great innovations of our run flat
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tires i still don't know if competitors do anything like this and one of the reasons is because it's patented is
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asymmetry in the sidewall stiffnesses of our entire design the run flat part is
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on the interior sidewall that also plays a great role in the handling of the
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vehicle because it makes the tire work a lot better for transferring cornering
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forces and braking and acceleration torques we have the outside tires soft
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and supple that allows the tire to have a nicer ride as well as a bigger contact
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patch to get really great grip that is one of the key technological features of
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the run flat tires the fact that you can do so much with the stiffness is inside the outside of the tire and it just
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opens up a huge tuning box for making the tire match to the specific characteristics of a vehicle as well
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when you adjust the stiffnesses inside the outside on the sidewall guys i also know that one of the huge tire lines for
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michelin is the pilot sport tire talk about the development of the pilot sport and the significance it plays with
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corvette pilot sport tireline is a pretty old tire line that goes back into the 90s
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and it really represents what i talked about a little bit earlier the philosophy of bringing sport or
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competition into a summer tireline before pile of sport we had summer
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performance tires but when we went to pilot sport we really brought in a lot
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of know-how savoir faire since we are a french company from the racing knowledge in
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formula one as well as in endurance racing into the street tires a specific
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example of that and some stuff that jeff has worked really closely on as well is the modeling of the contact patch taking
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all the dynamics of the way a tire corners and breaks and accelerates and what it does to the contact patch shape
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we are able to adapt the models that were developed in michelin formula one
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to work on street tires and jeff you're probably one of the most recent experts in that in some of your modeling lately
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right jeff i'd say that tire modeling is a tough problem and it's definitely come a long way in a very short time here
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recently it's a composite structure and everybody thinks of airplane wings and fiberglass and stuff like that but tires don't get
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as much love and then you start thinking about it it's a huge composite of rubber you've got steel in our case kevlar
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cords and everything else it's a big deflection problem so mathematically it's an interesting problem to get to
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work on and there's been a lot of advances recently giving us really good predictions through finite element
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simulation that we use heavily on corvette and throughout the michelin pilot sport line when jeff matches the
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modeling part the first thing the guys told me when i left call graduate school at nc state to come to work here was you
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could go work on non-linear thermal sensitive compositives nothing is simple
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i said you're absolutely right there's nothing simple there non-linear viscoelastic temperature sensitive all
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those things come into play i remember my first introduction was dr ryan and he
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goes this is probably the most complicated composites problem there are and has been around for 100 years
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so i always like that that's amazing guys also talk about the growth of the
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pilot sport because we have the all season plus we had the all season three the three plus and that started in the
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sixth generation corvette and went through seventh generation didn't it yeah it sure did now with actually the
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eighth generation corvette we actually have a pile of sport off-season zp tire
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that comes original equipment on the stingray the standard stingray so that comes with all-season tire from that
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same very long line of expertise that we developed here in north america that's
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something that we put on our trophy we're the world experts of all season tires the performance of all-season tire
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in the eighth generation has become so great even in dry conditions even on a
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handling race track that corvette has decided to allow us to have all-season tire as original equipment so you get it
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brand new right from the dealership and you don't have to buy those and fit them aftermarket like it was for a lot of the
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earlier generations now on the earlier generations all corvettes had summer tires only and michelin as a separate
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project as our aftermarket we offer the off-season versions and we did work with general motors and
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corvette with those that we would show those tires to the really great engineers that we work with up in
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milford all along the way but that all-season tire on the v8 stingray that came original equipment is pretty
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special it's got pretty good performance and snow and great performance and wet
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it's amazing on the track i have a lot of people that have off-season tires they come to me all the time saying i
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drive these on the track they're fine they're great that's fantastic you know guys retired corvette test driver jim
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miro is a big friend of the corvette today podcast i bet you've got some great stories about jim and the c6 zr1
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oh yeah we can talk about jim and things that we did with jim he was my partner in innovation i'd say our partner in
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crime for information because we broke a lot of the rules that big engineering companies have just for the spirit of
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innovating and trying to do better every time we had a new tire project with jim coming from the c6 zr1 to the c6 the z06
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that had ps cups the original ps cups on and every time when i'd show up in milford at the test track he'd look at
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me and say okay two seconds willard jim's demanding you know you only want a few seconds
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faster right yeah that's right he always wanted those two seconds and so every project we always made improvements and
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that was very much a product of our spirit for innovation and passion the passion that jim had when you talk about
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passion and some of the things that jim did if you go back to the c6 zr1 what
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was that suggested retail price about ninety thousand dollars jeff do you remember i think that one was in the six
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digits yes i think that was the first corvette over a hundred thousand dollars jim drove that thing around the
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nurburgring the c6 zr1 a second faster than the porsche carrera gt and the
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porsche carrera gt i think must have been a 400 000 or maybe half million dollar car so that was a really great
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thing that we got to see jim do is to take the c6 zr1 with our michelin pilot
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sport 2 zps and beat the carrera gt by 2nd that was really cool that's amazing
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that was only one of the many many many nurburgring trips that jeff and i have made over there not to mention track
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trips to all kinds of race tracks all around the united states from california to road atlanta to vir we did a lot of
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great work with jim jim is the man i spent a lot of time in germany with him on c7 real impressed how much of the
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details he was in how much time he spent studying data to get faster and we did a lot of work with setup and all sorts of
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things to make sure he got the most out of the tires in the car it was a lot of fun that's a great story jim is like i
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said a great friend of the show he's going to love to hear this podcast that's for sure guys we talked a little
28:32
bit about this earlier in the segment but talk about some of the significant developments that happened during the c7
28:38
generation c7 generation first of all the big significant development was having dr jeff come in on the team he's
28:45
been super doing all the real serious engineering work where you have to solve the equations
28:51
and write the models he also brought a fresh mind into innovation with great ideas i always put that up there as one
28:57
of my favorite advances in the c7 generation and glad still be working with them on c8 and if you go after that
29:04
one of the big deals for the c7 generation was the advent of using
29:10
multiple tread compounds in the tire instead of just using one tread compound in the tire i think the c6 zr1 had one
29:17
tread compound the c6 cr1 with ps cups had two compounds now you get into the
29:22
c7 generation we're using two and three compounds that really helped us get a leg up into
29:30
another realm of performance and that idea just to touch on another point in our discussion it came from motorsports
29:37
not that we have multi-compound tires all over the place in motorsports but you know every weekend when jeff and i
29:44
would go to the track and work at a race we would come in and tell all the fans
29:49
at the corvette crowds hey we got three tires for this weekend we got a hard compound a medium compound soft compound
29:56
and then we also have a cold wet and a drying wet and what we were doing there is taking all those different qualities
30:04
of motorsports tires and seeing if we could incorporate those different types of rubber compounds and their
30:10
characteristics into one tire that was built for the street and the track we just used the flexibility of our process
30:18
c3m so we could put the tread rubber exactly where we want to have the shred rubber you know the outside might take a
30:24
different kind of rubber compared to the inside as well as different arrangements according to what kind of tread pattern
30:31
might be on the car so the c7 we started using a lot more of this multi-tread
30:37
compound strategy where the tread compound is placed specifically in the tread pattern as well as position side
30:44
to side or across the tire to get the great performance so you put the rubber where you need it the rubber that works
30:51
best here that's where you'd put it that's cool and i guess we would be remiss if we didn't discuss the current
30:56
generation of corvette the c8 let's talk about some of the technology advances you guys have seen for this mid-engine
31:03
supercar yeah c8 it definitely is pushing the envelope as far as what we're able to
31:08
leverage from modeling and simulation really taking all these great ideas that lee's always had in driving these
31:14
performances so far and trying to mathematically reproduce them so we can really hone in on the best solution for
31:20
the car and heavily working with our partners at general motors to do driver in the loop type simulations where we
31:25
have a test driver on a platform driving the tires that we're trying to build later but doing this all virtually so we
31:31
can iterate very fast and get to a much better solution with that for the c8r we
31:37
went a step farther now we're running three compounds in the tire and i've even looked at more compounds in the
31:43
tire we also have a couple other really cool innovations uh
31:48
c806 which is brand new for this summer but we have a belt package the belt
31:54
package is actually profiled under the tread ribs so it gives more stiffness to
31:59
the tread pattern and you get even better handling than with normal traditional belts which are usually flat
32:06
these are belts that work in the composite of the tire to give even better handling and jeff was big into
32:12
that you have any words of wisdom on the profile belts jeff that was always an
32:18
interesting technology to me because i always made it analogous to a piece of sheet metal those belts and a tire it's
32:24
not very stiff but when you corrugate them and you put some bins in it that sheet metal becomes super stiff that's
32:30
exactly what we're able to do with that profile belt package is making extremely stiff and responsive so all those
32:36
steering inputs get directly translated back to the driver and i think really up to our level of steering precision and
32:41
handling on this car that works really well with the mid-engine concept of having the driver right in the middle of
32:47
the car so the car rotates around him so you have extremely responsive tires on
32:52
all four corners and a driver that's being very precise in his driving inputs
32:58
they all work together perfect after the profile belts we also had aramid carcass
33:03
well that's a kevlar carcass so that's really high technology textile material
33:08
that's used in military aerospace applications is light and strong of steel and this is the first example i
33:16
can think of any sports car tire using kevlar as the commercial name or air made carcass so that's super strong very
33:24
enduring and consistent they just all work together to make a great handling precise tire and people seem to be able
33:30
to see this and feel it for themselves when they get their z06s and i'm glad you mentioned the z06 because john
33:36
elegant from mid engine corvette forum.com found out that you guys were going to be on the show and he wanted to
33:41
know as the new c8 z06s and z07s come in with the cup 2rs and especially with
33:48
national corvette museum deliveries driving home those long distances you know sometimes it's kind of tough will
33:54
you guys have available the pilot sport fours to immediately switch out when a customer gets a z06 delivered yes steve
34:01
those tires they're in production right now so we have those tires in our warehouse there are some available for
34:08
people that want to do that you'd have to order them through your normal commercial online or through a tire deal
34:15
and they could arrange to maybe have tires put on your car bowling green right after you pick them up and drive
34:21
them home the contract with general motors is we don't sell any tires in a replacement market until the cars are
34:26
for sale so i think that we are right on the cusp of cars being for sale at
34:32
dealers but when those first cars available for sale and pickup then our
34:37
tires will be released in the marketplace for aftermarket as well so that could be a range you could have buy
34:44
tires from a dealer or bring them to bowling green and have them fit into your car and drive back to california or
34:50
florida or wherever you come from that sounds good well john will be very happy about that guys guys let's take our
34:56
final break and when we come back we're going to talk more about michelin at le mans we've got lee willard and dr jeff
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and now back to corvette today with your host and my husband steve garrett
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hey thanks for listening and watching corvette today the podcast that talks about everything corvette brought to you
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today is lee willard and dr jeff anderson from michelin in this third and final segment we're going to talk more
38:49
about le mans guys you've got to have some great le mans stories talk about that experience out in france
38:55
yes we have some great stories i tell you what anybody that works as a tire
39:01
person during le mans we don't say refer to it as the 24 hours le man we refer to
39:07
it as the somewhere between 38 and 40 hours of the month because it starts
39:12
early in the morning with a ride on a tram from downtown the city out to the
39:17
race track the sun's just coming up it's about six am and you prep you get ready
39:23
for warm up and then you spend usually until either 3 p.m in the afternoon on
39:29
saturday or 4 p.m in the afternoon on saturday and then the race starts i always wonder why in the world they do
39:35
that start the race so late because you've already spent a good working day at the track getting ready doing
39:41
whatever you need to do worrying about things checking it twice checking it three times and then you start a 24-hour
39:48
race that doesn't end until four o'clock on sunday and then you have to clean up
39:53
and get all your reports issued and put together before you can rest the personal endurance is pretty tough as
39:59
well for that race i don't know jeff you've done lemon twice now yeah so i've done it in 2017 with you and then by
40:06
myself last year in 2021 when we got second yeah for some reason our motorsports group decided that we're
40:12
going to just put jeff out there all by himself but no that's typically our model for running the race you have one
40:18
motor sports engineer with a two-car team and i tell you when you have two guys
40:23
working on it makes it a lot easier but one person for that job is really tough
40:28
at the end of the race you say why in the world did i ever do this but then you wake up the next morning you can't
40:33
wait for the next year so you always want to go back i can imagine i did lemon i think with corvette 12 times
40:41
from 2008 to 2019 and i did it 20 years in a row so i have the one distinction
40:47
about being the only american race engineer that has done le mans 20 years in a row jeff i think the wins at le
40:54
mans when i worked with corvette were 2009 2011 2015. those were great one of
41:01
the most exciting races was 2017 when i was working with jeff
41:07
atlamon and jeff was doing the number three car jeff why don't you tell them the experience of the last couple laps
41:14
of that race well the mall for me is the pinnacle of everything it's amazing to get to be a part of because i can
41:20
remember watching lamar with the c6r days back at home on speed network so it was amazing to get to work on this
41:26
specifically that 2017 year was incredible to me the last couple laps the battle we had with aston martin was
41:32
so fierce there's passing back and forth on the last lap and i just remember jordan taylor what a stand-up guy an
41:39
amazing driver getting that car across the finish line it was something to watch all the battle wounds on it going
41:45
across the finish line the front tires weren't spinning it was such a highlight for me to get to see that and how hard
41:50
corvette fought for that third place there was incredible yeah i remember the whole front stands in the standing
41:58
ovation and french people yelling bravo and sparks coming out from underneath
42:03
jordan taylor's car absolutely jeff's car he carried that car kept the pressures right he'll
42:09
figure out the compounds all the way through that 24-hour race just really shows what a competition this is you can
42:16
have these cars all run for 24 hours and all finish on the same lap within
42:22
seconds of each other one of them coming across the finish line with no tires no brakes and sparks coming out from
42:29
underneath the car was pretty incredible that's an amazing story it's definitely something to watch the highlight of my
42:35
career for sure and we may have gotten third but i felt like we won that thing that day
42:40
absolutely right guys talk about your relationship with pratt miller i know you've got to work very close with them
42:46
for corvette racing yeah i always consider pratt miller they're part of a triangle here with corvette you have
42:53
general motors all the engineers and the company with general motors working on corvette
42:58
you have pratt miller bringing all their race experience their vehicle and tire modeling even you know they work on
43:05
models with us driver and loop stuff that jeff does and then you have michelin so we're all a triangle working
43:12
to meet the needs of consumers for the best sports car in the world as well as
43:17
working to be number one in the world of motorsports competition for sports car racing and general motors to build the
43:24
cars and we all work back and forth jeff you can tell them about some of the exchanges on modeling it's great to work
43:30
with those guys pinnacle of their profession there and we glean so much in from what we do on the racetrack and
43:36
able to take that back and to develop street cars and help push the envelope from all the efforts we do on the
43:41
motorsports side and we really get a lot from the relationship at pratt and miller being able to make that connection happen guys during the 24
43:48
hours of le mans talk about the role that michelin plays and the duties that you perform during the race itself our
43:54
focus is the tire we also want to absorb all the other information that comes
44:00
that can influence or affect the tire which comes from a lot of different areas you have to know about the
44:06
environment the ambient conditions the temperature of the track the temperature of the air is it going to rain i can
44:12
remember doing le mans 20 years ago when you didn't really have that good radar or any idea when rain was going to come
44:19
in and hit the track and the track being eight and a half miles around it rain on one side but not the other side but also
44:25
the driver you have to get feedback from the drivers to understand how well they're able to use the tire like
44:31
antonio garcia tommy milner oliver gavin jeff and i have a really close personal
44:38
working relationship with those guys the ability of those guys to keep a tire running really fast or lap time really
44:44
fast and have consistent performance from the entire lap after left after lap and maybe extending the extents instead
44:51
of doing two stents do three stents with the same set of tires all those things are really important and then even
44:58
beyond the drivers the other connection is the engineers pratt miller has a wonderful engineering team jeff and i
45:04
working at le mans we talk to all these people at the same time we go between them back and forth and try to figure
45:11
out exactly what the best pressures are needed what compounds are the best and
45:16
feed michelin information back for next year's designs as well as pratt miller engineers information so they can set
45:24
race strategy wouldn't you agree jeff i think that's spot on going across the line and looking at tires and double
45:30
stints and making sure that they're clean and ready to send back out it gets the heart racing when you have to line
45:36
up for a pit stop and go over the wall good point there you never know the feeling that when your car is in first
45:42
place is probably one of the most anxious feelings you did as a tire engineer and you need to go out there
45:48
during the fuel stop and stick your hand underneath the tire and feel the inside
45:53
sidewall and shoulder area and make a determination if you think that tire can run for another full spin of fuel
46:00
because if it has to come in early because the tires are worn out then you lose the race right jeff my heart beats
46:07
like 9 000 rpms and i don't breathe [Laughter] we did a triple stint last year to try
46:13
to gain some position and yeah that whole third step your eyes are just looking at the pressure traces just
46:19
saying oh my god come on and he'd come on the radio boy katzberg drove that thing like a champ and got it in but
46:25
you're right that whole last stint you're crossing your fingers and not breathing very much that's incredible and you guys have got
46:31
to love the fans there in france too yeah the fans are crazy no matter how
46:37
hard the race is physically and mentally when you see how much fun everybody has
46:42
it's incredible don't you think jeff absolutely corvette has the best fans in the world doesn't matter the race and i
46:48
think just like you said for the 2017 win the number of corvette flags and those grand stands that were flying it
46:54
was always something to see it was amazing you have corvette fans coming from the u.s now but also yann magnuson
47:01
it seemed like he had the whole country of denmark it turned into corvette fans and a lot of guys from england they
47:07
follow oliver gavin and that's really cool they are highly spirited having a
47:12
great time and i will suggest to anybody that's listening to the podcast here
47:17
that if you ever get a chance to spend a week in france in june during the summer
47:24
that's one of the best vacations you can have please do it it's easy to do you fly to charleston get on a train train
47:30
unless you out right in downtown le mans you'll be there with another three or four hundred thousand people that just
47:36
love sports car racing that's got to be on my bucket list i know that's for sure
47:41
guys let's talk about technology from the racing all the way to the street cars i know that corvette is very proud
47:48
of that talk about how that technology gleaned from corvette racing goes into the street cars back in the day our
47:55
slogan for michelin motorsports was race to win race to learn and i always loved that the track being a full-blown
48:02
laboratory where we're going out trying things and we're able to take what we learn out there and bring it back into
48:07
the other facets of the company and i think that's been so much of what we do as a company and how we're able to do
48:12
what we're able to do on these sports cars yeah and you get into tire components and design of our tires i can
48:19
just go down a huge list that probably hits every part of the tire starting with the rubber the rubber that we use
48:26
on corvette tires really only existed in the competition realm before you know we
48:31
only use it on tires that were used for competition purposes only but with a lot of innovation in the way we design our
48:37
street tires we were able to make that softer stickier rubber last longer on
48:42
the street so that brought those insane grip levels the same grip levels that tommy milner has during qualifying
48:49
brought them to someone that might go out to a club event so yeah rubber transfer technology is important belt
48:56
angles belt materials carcass materials the shape of the tire the way we
49:01
designed the contact patch and i think one of the most exciting new things from competition to street tires is all the
49:08
work that dr jeff is such a specialist at and that is entire modeling and
49:13
driver and loop simulation a lot of that stuff happened first in competition and
49:18
now it's coming into the streetcar and street tire realm we'll design tires and
49:24
work through setups on cars on a computer with simulator jeff you might go a little bit more into that having
49:30
our drivers be able to hop in on a simulator and us do a full-blown submission virtually looking at what
49:36
works what doesn't how do we change the car to make it work around these tires and how do we change the tires to work around the car has been incredible
49:42
helping us iterate faster look at more interesting things and really push the products to much better places it's been
49:49
a wild ride how far that's come in such a short time it is amazing and i'm so glad of that because it's so cool to
49:56
talk about your street car being developed from corvette racing yeah the race car guys have been using simulators
50:02
for maybe a decade or so now they would actually work through the strategies to use during a 24-hour race which is real
50:09
important because you go through the day you go through the night temperatures increasing cooling down all the
50:15
different strategies and scenarios that can come across at 24-hour endurance rates when you can work on that in the
50:21
simulator is important because you can get a head start on your competitors and when you can do that and so because of
50:28
motor sports and this simulation working for racing strategy has progressed so far over the last decade now we can put
50:35
it into street car and street tire use which can have the possibility for even more variable conditions you know when
50:42
you go from snow to wet to rain to yeah i want to go down to road atlanta and see how fast i can do a lap that
50:48
simulation is important for us to grab all the possibilities and think about
50:54
how to optimize across the board it's interesting that problem goes back to the 50s back in the f1 days trying to
51:01
just simplify how do you get lap time predictions out of these cars and it's rolled all the way into what we have
51:07
today with computers getting so much better and able to simulate so much more physics so much better that the driver
51:12
is actually able to get a pretty realistic impression of what's going on virtually so it's been incredible that
51:18
is incredible well guys thank you so much for taking the time to be on corvette today lee willard and dr jeff
51:25
anderson it's been an honor and a pleasure to have you on the podcast hey steve stay with us what a pleasure yeah
51:32
steve it's an honor to be on and get to talk about corvette it's awesome thanks for listening to corvette today and
51:37
please be sure to tell your family friends and other corvette enthusiasts about the corvette today podcast and
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52:34
with steve garrett if you'd like to contact steve with any thoughts on the podcast or ideas for guests on corvette
52:40
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52:45
that's stevegarrettdj gmail.com garrett has two r's and two t's or
52:52
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52:58
thanks again for listening to corvette today
53:24
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