Any race team will tell you how important tires are during a race weekend. Depending on the choices a team makes along with their tire engineer, it can make or break their weekend.

Ahead of this evening’s FIA World Endurance Championship race at the Circuit of The Americas, the 2013 WEC Champion and former winner at Circuit of The Americas, Allan McNish shared his views of track conditions, tire selection and how Audi works with their Michelin tire engineer.

“From the tire perspective, this circuit has got quite high tire energy. It has some long, fast corners, quick change of directions, some adverse camber, especially in two corners in Turn 6 and then 16 and 17.

“So from that point of view with high speed and this high energy going into it, it also means that the tire is doing a lot of work, which means we have to be very careful with the way that we treat the tires and as well as that you have track temperatures over 40C (100F) as soon as the sun comes out and quite a big fluctuation of track temperature which then effects our tire choice as well,” explained McNish.

“It’s going to be a real race of making sure that we’re on the correct tire at the correct time which is where we are going to have to rely very heavily on our tire engineers as well and Serge who works with us at Audi has been fantastic at that in the past and we’re certainly going to have to rely on his experience in terms of his feel for what these pieces of black magic are going to give us come the race afternoon.”

The 6-hour FIA WEC race goes green at 5 pm local time and will be broadcast live on Fox Sports 2.