Wheels in Motion

As you can imagine a team goes through a lot of tyres during a 24hr endurance event with 2 practice sessions, 2 qualifying sessions, night practice, warm up and the race itself. Keeping track of tyre usage, monitoring and setting tyre pressures and tyre location is a key role within a team. For ZRT Motorsport, Jason Lyness is the teams tyre technician and to help Jason manage the tyres, the teams in-house fabrication expert and self confessed tool addict Richard “The Tool Man” Bailey has fabricated 4 moveable wheel trolleys. These will be used to store the new tyres mounted on wheels, a set of used tyres and to move them to the front of the garage prior to a pitstop.

Those with a keen eye will have spotted that the units only have 3 wheels (one of which locks so the unit doesn’t roll away). Why 3 wheels you ask? Well Richard has built the units on the milking stool principle that a stool with 3 legs will not rock as all 3 legs will always be in contact with the ground.

A second and equally useful feature is the centre bar is in two parts so the team doesn’t have to lift all 4 wheels up and over the centre bar. Richard is not just a pretty face you know……….

The team is aware that Richard is fabricating another useful device for the event in his garage or “man cave” as the team calls it. So stay tuned for further updates from the cave.