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The 24 Hours of Lemons Forums → Bench Racing → All-Season Tires?
All the 'real racers' are running 200tw tires.
I am wondering how all-season tires will hold up to racing.
It isn't a question about performance, we know the 200tw tires will be much faster, more grip.
Is there a false economy to cheaper tires
that won't last. 300tw should last longer! lol
Depends what the car is and how it's driven. Any car that's driven remotely aggressively will benefit from the "correct" 200tw tire. A truly crappy car, on soft suspension, driven by noobs who are not pushing very hard, sure higher treadwear tires will last a while longer. but as soon as you start pushing they often fail faster because they aren't designed to hold up to the abuse and heat.
We ran extremecontact DW tires the first race on the saab because they were 300tw and we wanted them to last on a big heavy car. They lasted a single race and they didn't have a lot of grip in the dry (but they rock in the wet). After that we went to 200TW tires and got the same durability with a lot better grip. Now we're running the RS4s and getting twice the life per tire for the same grip as the falkens we used to run.
So basically, if you are trying to be even remotely competitive, use the better tire, it's usually worth it.
It's also dependent on the track surface and layout. CMP eats tires as a snack before breakfast and we can barely make it through one day on the LF. By contrast, at Barber we can run all weekend on the same tires. Road Atlanta is also easy on tires.
200tw tires wear good on the track. All season tires can suffer from chunking where you lose portions of the tread if pushed too hard. It really depends on what the car is and how hard you drive it. I have raced with Spank on all-seasons, snow tires, skinny tires, bald tires, 10" tires. You can make it work, but it may be a false economy as you say. I have been running 200tw Dunlops/Falkens on my Class B Volvo and get a couple races out of them if I remember to rotate.
There are a million tire threads on this forum. Google search 'site:24hoursoflemons.com [insert tire you want to try here]' and you will probably get a hit. There are some higher treadwear tires some people have had good luck with.
Check the Firestone Firehawk Indy 500's. They wear like iron, you can abuse them all you want and they don't care at all, and they're cheap. They're about 2-3 seconds off the pace of an average 200tw. One downside is 16" is the smallest wheel diameter they come in.
We ran the General G-max RS tires last year. Tread pattern is a little weird with 3 large grooves down the middle of the contact patch. This leads to essentially 4 shoulder sections on the tire. They wore poorly until we got the camber right. Once we had the camber fixed no complaints from us. Like the Indy 500s, wheel size is limited to 16, 17, and 18. Comparable in price to the Indy 500s and even cheaper if you get them when General Tire offers there $75 rebate once or twice a year.
What I'm wondering is to require say a 240tw or 280tw or 300tw tire, is that lowering racing costs at the expense of speed, or just making people use crappy tires that wear out faster and cost more?
It would be another learning curve to find the best tire, but in some ways that levels the playing field initially.
I just bought some FederalSS at $50 each, have not tried them yet, but at half the price of the others, if its lasts just as long it is saving money.
As you know, tires can be a big expense, the 200tw (now it is 180tw? rule tries to limit it, but can we go farther?
What about Douglass?
Ran into this guys results of testing a bunch of tires for drifting. Makes the Federal ss look really good!
Inde eats tires like no other track I've driven, so we kept heading toward all-seasons in the interest of not having to do an emergency tire buy in Tucson on Sat afternoon. Have ended up running 255/40-17 Riken Raptor ZR- cheap and they don't chunk, and will go the full weekend at Inde, which is more than I can say for Direzzas, Pilot Sports, or Comp T/A GForce (can't recall the exact designation of the 300 TW BFG tires, sorry)... I'm not convinced of the need for serious tires on a B class beast. YMMV at the pointy end of the field...
The raptor is in my opinion the only good alternative to "real tires" most non race tires simply chunk. We finished top 10 in a 24hr race on rikens. 1 set. Still had tire left to run another race. That being said. We could have likely won given the extra 1-2 seconds a lap from hancooks which also should have made it the entire race.
Cost savings with the rikens are tremendous our tire budget went up by nearly 4x when going to hancooks. The rikens last about twice as long and cost half as much. I really think they make great starter tires to save money while everyone's leaning to drive.
PRO TIP: when using rikens fit the widest tire you can to make up for lack of grip and increase tire life. We ran 255 40 17
Glad we agree 
in summary, run Raptors if you're driving anything quicker than a Borgward but not imagining a run at the front of the field. I just thought it was interesting where Raptors work where Direzzas wear out: that's Inde. And yes, go wide. Really wide.
The 24 Hours of Lemons Forums → Bench Racing → All-Season Tires?
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