Made from rubber sourced from a desert plant, it uses less water than other rubber processes.
Chris Jones – IMS/IndyCar Photo
Bridgestone Americas is taking an interesting turn towards the use of sustainable natural rubber in the manufacturing of its NTT IndyCar Series tires.
Announced at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Earth Day, a new racing tire will debut in May during the Indy 500 Pit Stop Competition featuring a green band around the sidewall to indicate the shift from production utilizing rubber taken from trees to rubber harvested from the guayule shrub. The eco-friendly advancements are found with the need for fewer resources to create guayule-based tires.
“It all goes around to sustainability,” Cara Krstolic, the director of race tire engineering and manufacturing, and chief motorsports engineer for Bridgestone Americas, told Road & Track. “The hevea brasiliensis, the tree where we currently get our natural rubber, is renewable, but we look at the amount of water that goes into the manufacturing process along with the fact that there’s some geopolitical instability in areas where it’s grown. With guayule, it uses a lot less water to produce and it’s grown in the U.S. Southwest. Compared to other plants grown in the region like corn and alfalfa, it requires about half the water.”
Bridgestone
After the Indy 500 Pit Stop Competition debut, the green-banded guayule Firestone Racing tires will make their first appearance in an IndyCar race during August’s visit to Nashville for the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix street race where they will serve as the softer ‘alternate’ compound for teams to use. Those tires will be manufactured from guayule that’s grown and harvested by Firestone’s parent company.
“Bridgestone launched its guayule research initiative in 2012, when it broke ground on a guayule processing and research center in Mesa, Arizona,” the company said. “Today, the company operates the research center in Mesa, as well as a 281-acre guayule farm in Eloy, Arizona. Bridgestone has invested more than $100 million in its efforts to commercialize guayule, achieving major milestones such as producing the first tire made from guayule-derived natural rubber in 2015, and continued expansion of its guayule molecular breeding program.”
As part of its greater embrace of sustainable practices, the thousands of race tires Firestone will deploy to the Indy 500’s field of 33 drivers will be transported from its manufacturing plant in Ohio to Speedway, Indiana, in all-electric tractor trailers.
“The introduction of guayule natural rubber to America’s preeminent open-wheel racing series speaks to the confidence we have in the technology and its promise as a scalable, sustainable and domestic source of our industry’s most vital raw material,” said Nizar Trigui, CTO and group president for solutions businesses at Bridgestone Americas. “It will take partnership and collaboration to combat the impacts of global climate change and we are proud to partner with Penske, IndyCar and IMS to advance the future of sustainable mobility.”
Keyword: This Is IndyCar's New Sustainable Tire