UK cement plant to burn Australian GP tyres as AF

A cement plant near Oxfordshire in the UK will be burning around 1800 Pirelli tyres from the cancelled Grand Prix in Melbourne, Australia.

"We finished assembling the tyres on Thursday afternoon and then we had to disassemble everything," begins Mario Isola, Pirelli's representative in F1, on the 'Autosport' website. If the GP had been in Europe, those tyres could have been reused, but being in Australia, there is no longer any possibility: "The only problem is the tyres that are already installed on the rims, because in that case they will be damaged. For now, the limitation is that when we remove a tyre from the rim, we put a lot of stress on the rim and we do not trust it to fit a wheel again, because the level of load they receive is immense. So we do not want to take any risks "

To move these tyres back to the United Kingdom, it is necessary to separate them from the rims, since transporting the tyres by plane is a matter for the teams. So there is no other option but to discard them. Normally the Italian brand gets rid of about 560 rain tyres, but this case has been more extreme.

“We piled up the tyres to fit into a few containers and shipped them back to the UK, …. We burned them at high temperatures and created energy, but not pollution," Mr Isola concludes.