The 24 Hours of Lemons Forums → Lemons Newcomers → How many sets of tires?
First time team captain, thanks in advance for your input. How many sets of tires should I plan on going through for a 2 day 14hr race? It's an E46 sedan and we're not planning on pushing our luck or our car too hard.
Also any stand out budget friendly tire options y'all would recommend?
Thanks again!
6 total tires on wheels. Falken Azenis 615K is the "easy" button as they are the cheapest of the commonly raced tires and perform predictably on almost any car.
That said, we have raced on 7-year-old non-matching all season tires and had just as much fun...just different fun.
Folks have been expirementing with some budget tires that could take the place of the old. long discontinued "Primewell" entry-level racing tire.
https://shop.maxxis.com/collections/com … W9EALw_wcB
Not heard back on how they did.
Wow that's good news, was assuming I'd need 3 full sets haha!
I agree with the six mounted tires. In nine years, we've never brought more to a race or needed to.
In a 14.5 hour race we rarely have had to use more than the four we started with.
It would help if you provided which track(s) you plan to be running. Some tracks will destroy tires in a day, other tracks you can get 3-4 races on the same set.
Road Atlanta
Hey. Thats great! We are going to Road Atlanta next month too!
We drove a big heavy Crown Vic for 24 hours at Carolina Motorsports Park. It was our first race. We went full 24 hours noon to noon. We went through 8 tires.
With your car, it would be unlikely that you would need more than 6 for 14 hours. But luck favors the prepared. If you bring 8, you will definitely have enough tires.
What will most likely happen is on Saturday you will burn through 2 of your tires on one axle, (on our car it was the front,) and the other pair will look fairly undamaged. After Saturday's race you will replace the two worst tires with the two brand new tires. 6 should be plenty. Our answer is 6 mounted tires for your car at Atlanta, on a 14 hour race.
But it is highly unlikely you will need 8.
Another strong possibility is Saturday night all 4 will look ok and you simply rotate the fronts to the back. This keeps tire 5 and 6 new for your next race.
Our answer is still 6.
As far as good tires for cheap, we were very impressed with the Mucho Macho from Cosmo tires.
We were in this recap. https://youtu.be/_xY4Ao0XkZw
It's almost always track dependent, but there are other factors like the car's weight, camber settings, type of tire, etc.
Regarding the track, for 10 years prior to the recent repave at CMP, we could barely make it 7 hours w/o cording the LF on our FWD Honda. We always brought 6 tires, and ran new fronts each day. After the repave, we made it the full 24 hours on the same tires we started with. We ran Road Atlanta last year (first year with decent weather) on the same 4 tires all weekend and didn't even have to rotate them.
Hankook RS4 and Falken RT615k+ have good grip and seem to last at least a weekend for me. I have been running the Hankooks lately, they are a little wider on my wheels than the Falkens in the same size. I usually take at least 6 mounted tires. Thosee 200 treadwear tires typically don't chunk.
In general, it is 6 tires for a race. The Javelin usually needs a new set for each race. The Saturn can sometimes go two races.
Thank you all for your replies.
RS4s are the magical balance between best performance in the category and durability. They have almost as much grip as the 615k+, but they last so much longer. We can get two races out of a set of the RS4s on our 3400lb Saab, and we're setting similar lap times at each track to when we used the 615k+. These days we bring the car with either a new or 1 race used set of RS4s on it, and then we have a set of spare wheels with used 615ks from a couple years ago as emergency spares.
Yes each track and car is different, but I think most cars aren't using more than a set a weekend unless it's a track known for eating tires.
Yup...6 tires was all I ever needed for anything but the 24 hour races I did.
As said 24 we cut one down, and wore the front 2 out during the race so....we needed 7 total to get home.
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