Topic: Some wheely important questions about tires.
I'm trying to get a RX-8 ready for Gingerman. It's raced before at Barber in '18, and at that track we ran high performance all-seasons that did pretty well, but they're quite chunked now and I wouldn't rely on them for another race. I've had a bit of a hard time finding good lemony race tires for this car and I have a few quesions about tires and wheels I hope the experts (this means you) can help me with.
1) The obvious "which tires are best" question that everyone asks all the time. I've raced Falken Azenis R615K before, but on a much lighter car (~2300lbs vs. ~3000lbs) and wondered if anyone had some good input on how they hold up on middle-weight cars. It's rear-wheel drive, but not high torque, so it's not like we'll be spinning the tires coming out of every corner. Does someone have a perfect suggestion for another tire model that performs better somehow? We're not rich so money is definitely an object here.
2) Running non-OE-size tires: The OE size is 225/45R18, but for some reason it's really hard to find Lemons tires in that size. The aforementioned Azenis are easily available in 225/40 (for reasonable prices even), which would decrease the outer diameter somewhat. Is this bad? The only effects I can think of off the top of my head are decreasing the total amount of rubber in use (so reduced life?), and effectively lowering your final drive ratio.
3) Wheels: I assume we'll be mounting new tires on our existing wheels, but are considering an extra set of wheels so we can keep our old tires as backups (we may also buy a couple extra race tires and have them mounted for spares). For a car this weight, is it safe to just buy the cheapest alloys at TireRack or other retailer? Can we run cheap steel wheels? Or do we need to look for high-quality racing wheels? OEM wheels are really hard to find.
Thanks.
Rotaries are great, everyone should try them.