Good News! (here be hot takes on race rubber)

"ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com" (ita97)
07/06/2018 at 21:14 • Filed to: None

There may not be a new Dacia Sandero (so far as I know), but the July Fastrack is out.

https://www.scca.com/pages/fastrack-news

“1. #24710 (Club Racing Board) 200 Treadwear Tires
The CRB is considering requiring tires with a minimum treadwear rating of 200 for all IT cars.
Please provide your feedback through !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ”

The SCCA CRB is considering mandating 200 tread wear rated tires for all IT classes and is soliciting member input. This would allow racing on Falken 615+ Azenis type tires, which would mean significantly cutting the biggest running cost of club racing. On the Integra, this would be the difference between having to run a $1000 set of tires that last no more than one weekend (if I’m on my very best behavior, being very careful to always manage front tire temps, never locking up an inside front tire under turn-in, and rotating tires off the front after every singl e session), to running a $600 set of tires that one could drive the piss out of all day and still last more than one weekend even on a FWD car. I don’t care about adding a couple of seconds a lap over sticky rubber if everyone else is too.

Let those of us running inexpensive IT racecars go play on cheap, durable rubber, and they’ll find more of us will come out and play again if it costs less money to do. I know other folks with old IT cars in their garages that don’t play anymore because at some point life dictated that spending $1500-$2000 a weekend to play racecar just wasn’t in the cards anymore .

Not everyone has sights set on runoffs or going to the ARRC. Some of us just want to go play with our old racecars, and this would significantly lower the cost of doing so without relegating us to considering parade laps vintage racing with folks that sometimes don’t really want us there, don’t always want to really race, and are some times offended that 80's and 90's small displacement, and often econobox based racecars, are seconds per lap faster than their very sexy, but very old machinery from the 50's and 60's.

For me, this could be the difference between running one or two weekends per year to maybe, kinda, sorta, somehow finagling away to run a full season without credit cards bursting into flames. In my case, I could run even cheaper 195/60/ 14 Azenis in practice sessions on the CRX phone dial rollers to save a couple of heat cycles per weekend on the 15" set that I would actually run in qualifying and race sessions .

Send your letters to the CRB! I’ll be writing a strongly worded letter in support.

DISCUSSION (8)

M.T. Blake > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
07/06/2018 at 22:13

Tires and entry fees. The biggest expenses you’ll have unless something grenades.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > M.T. Blake
07/06/2018 at 22:42

Well, travel costs add up too. For many in the rocky mountain west, a race weekend can be a 500- 1000+ mile tow round round trip. Fuel for the tow vehicle, 2-3 nights hotel, plus a few restaurant meals on top of a $1000 set of tires and a $350 entry fee. And as always, if you crash or break the car, it gets a lot more expensive.

M.T. Blake > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
07/06/2018 at 23:01

Ugh... I’m so lucky to be in the SF Region. Farthest I went was Laguna at 5 hours. Sears is 2-1/2 and Thunderhill is about 1-1/2 hours away. I was doing double regionals and I remember it being $500 or so. Once you’ve got the equipment, the upkeep is the tires, brakes, fuel, and anything that breaks. If you don’t crash the car usually it’s a good weekend. Mind you I was doing Spec Miata with the sealed (read: junkyard) engines.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > M.T. Blake
07/07/2018 at 01:19

I remember the days in Spec Miata when the hot ticket was often a used 1.6l bottom end with around 140k on them, and fresh head cherry picked for better than average plunge cuts from the factory. I think I remember hearing about the steep entry fees out your way. Wasn’t there a deal where funds over a certain amount were distributed back to members at the end of the year?

There was a group of folks from New Mexico that ran some events out there back in the 2005ish time frame in Spec Miata. There was a 4 hour enduro at Laguna I crewed for them at in 2006. I didn’t drive that one, but I did get to be part of a thirteen minute diff change (back when they were still making the 1.6l cars run the viscous diffs, which blew up with some regularity). Pit stops were neat. We also had a car run the Pro Spec Miata race that was a support race for the Indycar weekend one year, and they did the 25 hours of Thunderhill a couple of times. The Indycar weekend was funny, because the shop only had one car going, so dragging the 52-foot trailer out there from Albuquerque didn’t make a whole lot of sense. They borrowed my rusty ass, old single-axle open trailer to pull behind the F-450, which I’m told made for the most homely looking rig in the paddock that weekend.

While I probably would’ve chosen to run a miata in ITA or ITS doing it again, I would’ve never chosen to build a FWD racecar had I realized what the tire costs were going to be. I run about the same lap times as Spec Miata, but I get one weekend out of the same set of tires the Spec Miata guys out here get 2-3 weekends out of. The integra isn’t bad on brakes (4-5 weekends on a set of fronts, many seasons on a set of rears), but it does eat front wheel bearings every 3-4 race weekends.

Spec Miata guys do too much body work for my preference, but they do have a lot of fun. Ironically, the only time I’ve touched another car on course in the integra was running (as the sole non-miata) an informal winter spec miata series at the local track in Albuquerque. The only time I nearly wrote off a borrowed car (through no fault of my own) also happened to be in a Spec Miata. Fortunately a punted car that wound up in front of me had the wherewithal to take his foot of the brakes and let his car go backwards off the outside of the turn into the dirt, because we were looking each other in the eye and I had nowhere to go with a wall to my outside and cars to my inside and not enough distance to stop in before were about to mee t nose-to-nose, hard.

Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
07/07/2018 at 02:09

Bridgestone RE-71R’s are pretty cheap in certain sizes (I’ve got C5 rims on the C4) and I can’t say I’ve ever had better dry track grip. They wear pretty quickly, for street tires, and are slick in the rain but I’d encourage you to consider them over the Falkens.

Stoked to hear people are realizing racing is too expensive and doing something about it. I’m basically doing nothing involving racing at the moment as I’m saving for a 12 trip to Greece in October versus an engine rebuild and new tires which somehow costs more.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief
07/07/2018 at 02:35

If this is enacted, there will certainly be choices for tires, and I would certainly explore options based on pricing/performance/contingency dollars available . I’ve gotten some bad reports on the RE71R on FWD racecars running endurance races. I have deep respect for Falken Azenis, and have run them as testing/development/pretending to be a Spec Miata for fun during a local winter Spec Miata race series tires since 2003. They’ll certainly get greasy if overheated, but I have never had one blister and cord on the integra (even when I’ve tried to kill old sets ). They are just so predictable at the limit, and they let go beyond the limit in a really nice, linear way. The other really nice thing is when they do get greasy, you can actually back off to 9.5/10ths for a couple of laps and they’ll come back to you. Even most R-compound tires won’t come back in a race if I overheat them.

The downside to this is going several seconds a lap slower and giving up considerable grip over sticky rubber, but if everyone is running similar hard rubber the racing ( and the amount of fun) doesn’t really change. These class of tires are also great on the track in the rain (compared to most R-compounds that aren’t a brand new, unshaven RA-1) .

All of the tires in this class will heat cycle out and get hard before they’ll ever run out of rubber. After 2-3 heat cycles, they start losing grip in a considerable way. If you’re gunning for an class championship in a division, you’d still run a new set of (considerably cheaper) tires every weekend. For most of us, we’d probably run 2-3 weekends on a set before replacing them/selling them to the drifter kids.

Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
07/07/2018 at 04:07

Aye I can totally see how the RE-71's would suck on a FWD vehicle. Hadn’t thought it through when making the suggestion but they’d get really greasy without a chance to cool off somewhat between turns, breaking and accelerating. They get super sticky on a RWD car but you’d likely lose a ton of speed in FWD. They will overheat and you will lose grip.

I would like to withdraw my suggestion.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief
07/07/2018 at 09:55

But hey, if Bridgestone wants to start offering contingency money, I’d be happy to see how I could make them work . It may also be possible that they would need to be shaven down to something like 4-6/32nds to cut down on tread squirm (and heat buildup) , but that also might be true of any of these tires to extract the most speed out of them . It will be interesting if it happens, because most road racers have been running nothing but r-compound tires for the last 30-40+ years. Switching to playing on (really good) street tires would certainly shake things up.

Have you played on R-compound tires before? If not, they’ll blow your mind with how much more grip they have over 200tw type rubber, but that grip costs you.