Heat Cycling and Performance Tires

[BADDASSC6]

[EDIT: Branched from here (http://www.motorgen.com/forum/showthread.php?t=18224).]

How soon are you ready to buy? I'm ordering some hoosiers from a hook up in solona beach and I can ask her what the price is. Group buy may be cheaper. I also have a bunch of track tires with >50% tread ( but heavily heat cycled) that I will part with cheap, but they are all 18-19".

[Vettezuki]

How soon are you ready to buy? I'm ordering some hoosiers from a hook up in solona beach and I can ask her what the price is. Group buy may be cheaper. I also have a bunch of track tires with >50% tread ( but heavily heat cycled) that I will part with cheap, but they are all 18-19".

What effect does the heat cycling have on remaining performance? Is it just that the material will be somewhat more, err, "fatigued" and prone to wear and degradation. In other words,

Tire A:
50% wear from non-performance driving.

Tire B:
50% wear from high performance (race) driving.

What's the difference going to be between these two starting from that wear point.

[BADDASSC6]

Heat cycling tires is similar to heat cycling metal. The actual structure of the compound and chemical balance change. If you overheat tires the rubber will become less tacky and harder. This will result in loss of grip.

Ideally ($$$) you would have multiple sets of tires and rims. You can scrub the tires by running them to operating temperature and then put them away for greater than a week. The result will be a tire that has improved grip and life.

This is why I was running three sets of the factory rims. They were cheap and I could manage my tires to go faster and save money. I got fucked by shitty rims that break.

The tire that I have are all with greater than 50% tread depth, but they have been heat cycled to piss (>20 times).

Some tires are more prone to this then others. Also my lotus and miata friends don't experience the same issue. I suspect that the don't heat up the tires as much as I do.

While I was setting up the car I could really manhandle it and get decent times for 1 or 2 laps then it would start sliding around. there was a lot of feathering on the tread which is a significant sign on a R888 type tire that is almost a full slick.

This is why you can buy used race tires on the cheap.

Professional series don't have to worry because they go through multiple sets of tires per race. Not much of an issue if you are exhausting the tire the first time it's run.

Some tire companies will scrub the tires for you with a machine. I asked if the $15 fee per tire was worthwhile, but I hear the machine just isn't that effective.

[Vettezuki]

Thanks for the info. I guess an area of continued research must be creating increasingly heat-cyling resistant compounds. That also must be a big part of why the F1 tires are like $10k a tire. At one point they were cooking up multiple batches and configurations for each circuits characteristics.

[BADDASSC6]

Thats three times more than my annual tire budget:huh:

[enkeivette]

Thats three times more than my annual tire budget:huh:

That's 5 times more than my annual food and gas budget.

[Vettezuki]

F1 costs are from a another planet. Engines, are hundreds of thousands of dollars and until recently were only required to make two races for a grand total of a few hundred miles.