Tire Shaving for Durability

[cbjohnk]

Has anyone been shaving tires to improve durability?  Running Hankook RS4's we are starting to see some pretty extensive blistering starting at full tread depth.  Basically just driving faster, but who wants to slow down   

 

Any success stories with shaving?

 

Carl

[wvumtnbkr]

I have never heard of rs4 blistering.  That is cray cray.

 

You can totally shave them.  They last forever and heat cycle out before wearing out, so go for it.

 

However, I am really wondering what is going on that you are blistering rs4!  Do you have like 600 hp or something?

 

Edit:  I would like to see pics.  There is something odd going on IMHO.

 

Edit2: Rs4 seem to love getting the crap beat out of them. 

Edited May 17, 2022 by wvumtnbkr

[ETR]

+1

 

Which end?  Or all 4?

 

If it’s just the front I’d be putting some more rear end rotation into the alignment.  One or more drivers gotta be plowing and just holding it to be blistering RS4’s. 

[Team Infiniti]

More info please

 

We can chunk the rear rs4s toward the end but it was abuse + too much camber.

[mender]

This is about as close as we get to wearing them out and chunking:

About 7 hours on the right front of the Civic. Could use a touch more camber.

 

Interesting. I uploaded the picture in the proper orientation and it displays upside-down, just like Ed's picture of his parts car. 

[jakks]

Brand new set we put on for NCM. 15 hours and pretty much done. We found a missing rear sway bar mount so we may had a bit more understeer than usual.

[mender]

7 minutes ago, jakks said:

Brand new set we put on for NCM. 15 hours and pretty much done. We found a missing rear sway bar mount so we may had a bit more understeer than usual.

Wear looks pretty even, car must be working well.

[wvumtnbkr]

15 minutes ago, jakks said:

Brand new set we put on for NCM. 15 hours and pretty much done. We found a missing rear sway bar mount so we may had a bit more understeer than usual.

I wouldn't call those done imho.  Probably get another 8 hours out of them.

 

That track is known to be aggressive on tires.

[jakks]

32 minutes ago, wvumtnbkr said:

I wouldn't call those done imho.  Probably get another 8 hours out of them.

 

That track is known to be aggressive on tires.

We will use them for test day Friday and I'm pretty sure we'd start to see issues if we tried to race them for 8 hours. 

[cbjohnk]

Here is what our tires looked like after our last race.  Tires are 225-45-15 on a first gen RX7.  2.5 deg negative camber and zero toe.  These tires were basically new at the beginning of the weekend.  Only had a 2 hours session on them at Laguna Seca, which is not very hard on tires.  The only slightly odd thing was that we bought then new from another team and the tires had early 2020 date code.  Don't know how the previous owners took care of them.  

 

The race was 8hrs and 7hrs at Willow Springs.  The worst tire was the drivers rear with drivers front being almost as bad.  Passenger side wasn't too bad, but got the worn lefts on Sunday.  Willow Springs is bumpy, abrasive and has two fast, long right hand turns.  Looking at the overall wear, it is pretty even across the tires with the exception of the gouging/chunking (which was also fairly evenly distributed across the tire).  We had not seen this amount of chunking previously at Willow Springs, so maybe it was the tires themselves (too old?  poorly stored?).  The other big difference was that our fastest driver upped his game and was driving 3 seconds a lap faster than he or any of us had driven before.

 

We had been really happy with RS4's in the past with wear similar to what you guys showed in your pics above.  Typically some chunking as they got older, but pretty minimal.  I did find a local shop that can shave tires, but I may wait and get some more "data".  It does seem that the Hankooks heat cycle out before the rubber is gone, so shaving probably won't reduce life.

 

Carl

[Ian]

That looks like it's been sevearly overheated, and for a long time.

 

Your fast driver may be achieving those lap times at the expense of overdriving the car, and the tires.

 

We had a rental driver who was used to racing on Hoosiers, and he used to do that to our tires.

He had to modify his driving style to punish the tires less.  He didn't get any slower.  He just drove a bit different.

[Team Infiniti]

Shavings not going to fix that, your tires are old , see if you get the same results on a new set.

Edited May 18, 2022 by Team Infiniti

[wvumtnbkr]

That almost looks like damage from going off track and then run on.  Any off track excursions?  It's soo localized without the surrounding area having any obvious issues.

 

I am going to reiterate that I don't think you CAN actually blister rs4s by over driving.  They just put up with soo much.  This would literally be the first set I have seen.

 

Also, a 1st gen doesn't have much power.  Certainly doesn't have much weight.  I don't think it could hurt rs4.

 

Ask if your drivers found the edge of the track a few times.

[Team Infiniti]

38 minutes ago, wvumtnbkr said:

That almost looks like damage from going off track and then run on

I can vouch this is the same damage we frequently encounter.

 

Any company evaluating tires really should come find us.

[cbjohnk]

That makes sense that the most of the damage in the previous picture was related to a spin.  There is def a flat spot there and there were def a couple of spins and wheels dropped.  We have seen that before, especially as the tires get older.  Poor selection of photo on my part

 

These pics show more of the issue I was concerned about.  These gouges (or whatever) were pretty evenly distributed around the circumference of the left side tires.  I can understand the old, poorly maintained tire reasoning.  They had very little on-track time, but were a couple years old.  That sitting time is death for Hoosiers and maybe Toyo RR's too.  Our sister team had similar experience with a 2nd gen RX7 and similarly old (date but not track time) tires.  They just mounted up some 245's on 15x8 to see if that helps.  Their car weighs about 300lbs more than our 1st gen.

 

I will keep a closer watch on this in the future.  Hopefully it was a one-off incident.  I liked the 2-3 enduro weekends we had previously experienced with RS4's.  Not the one and done

 

I did look at the GPS data from the weekend and its seems from that, the left side tires should get pretty beat.  Out of a 1:40 lap, about 30 seconds is spent in two right hand turns @ 85-115 mph and over 1g lateral.  We just hadn't experienced this kind of tire deg before, whether it was on Toyo RR's or Hankook RS4's.  

[MMiskoe]

15 hours ago, Ian said:

We had a rental driver who was used to racing on Hoosiers, and he used to do that to our tires.

He had to modify his driving style to punish the tires less.  He didn't get any slower.  He just drove a bit different.

The HoHo's will put up with much larger slip angles than a lot of tires.  The TW200's tend to fall off a bit if you try to slide them too much, their sweet spot is a pretty narrow range of slip angle in comparison.  As a result, the TW200's can be harder to drive at the limit.