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Racing slicks are designed for the race track. F1 tires are designed for F1 speeds. A Caterham in a grocery store checks neither box.

F1 cars have a lot of grip. Tires are very important in generating grip. That means putting F1 tires will make your car better on a track, right? If you know absolutely anything about slick racing tires, you will immediately know that the answer here is not yes, but that did not stop Driven Media from trying.

The test involves a Caterham and starts at a track. In almost any other situation, this would be a winning pairing. After all, tires designed for track use would get up to temperature with the car and give a track day special like the Caterham optimal performance in dry conditions. But these are tires designed for an F1 car, and the old soft Pirellis with massive sidewalls designed for undersized wheels unique to F1 at that. They are built with the expectation of F1 levels of pre-heating, downforce, straightaway speed, mid-corner speed, and monitoring, and even then they only last about thirty minutes.

That's too many problems to solve, so the Driven Media team simply never got close to solving them. Their great innovation of a custom-milled OEM hub to fit the odd-shaped tires got a set of single-lock racing wheels on the car, but the tires themselves provided little to no grip on track. So, they took the car around town instead. Where it performed even worse.

Any car with racing slicks on it is going to be a poor fit for every day use. Make those F1-spec slicks and you can successfully compromise the Caterham's last remaining roadworthy traits. Even tire blankets could not get the tires hot enough for any level of comfort around town. A bright green Caterham with F1-spec tires sure did attract attention in a parking lot, though, so, if you're willing to do something equal parts illegal and unsafe for novelty, the conversion has officially been done before.