An F1 Car With Big Wheels And Low Profile Tyres Looks Odd, But We Like It

We’re used to seeing F1 cars with dinky 13-inch wheels wrapped in fat, high-profile rubber. That’s why the sight of this Lotus E22 sitting on 18-inch wheels with low-profile tyres comes as a bit of a shock.

So why the change of wheels? It’s all part of a test for Pirelli. The trouble with the current high-profile tyres is that they don’t have a lot of relevance when it comes to road cars, which tend to have much larger wheels and lower profile tyres. For a company like F1 tyre supplier Pirelli, that limits what technology it can filter down into its consumer products, so the answer could lie in switching to larger wheels with a much lower profile tyre.

Lotus is running it’s current E22 F1 machine with the wheels at the final day of the mid-season test at Silverstone circuit, with former Marussia and Caterham driver Charles Pic behind the wheel. Should the decision go ahead for F1 to adopt these bigger wheels and lower profile tyres, we’d see them on the F1 grid from the 2017 season.

All technical pros and cons aside, what do you think of the way they look?