The idea is not anything new, but we’d by no means achieved it before. So we loaded up a race automobile and headed to the song to compete on two hundred treadwear avenue tires. The aim became to seize as plenty of data as reasonably viable throughout a race weekend and use it trying to parent out whether or not extremely-high-overall performance road tires should maintain up to the punishment of SCCA road racing.
We also wanted to try this so that everyone with a less costly facts acquisition system and a race automobile should mimic it. Our decision to race on street tires wasn’t all of a sudden. Late in 2018, the SCCA queried its membership as to whether or not two hundred treadwear tires must be delivered into membership racing. The response was now not overwhelmingly for the suggestion, but the idea didn’t prevent there. Soon thereafter, SCCA classed a non-compulsory configuration for the Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ in Touring 4, with these automobiles being given the selection to run at a discounted T4 weight if they met the bulk of the autocross Solo Spec Coupe policies — which include the use of 2 hundred treadwear tires (even though they can run any logo, now not merely the spec Falkens required in step with the Solo Rules).
While SCCA’s road tire thought for specific avenue racing training didn’t pan out, is without a doubt made us wonder how our vintage Touring four Nissan Sentra could perform on them.
Our Testing Procedure
We desired to collect information for this tale thru techniques conceivable by using the average racer. We ought to have rented music, added in an expert motive force, and sought a professional information analyst to interpret the files. However, none of that is effortlessly reproducible through you. So instead, we entered a low-priced SCCA Cal Club Region race at Buttonwillow Raceway Park that still featured a 90-minute enduro, and we added along a reasonably priced, off-the-shelf data machine to capture information about the two hundred UTQG tires we’d be racing on.
We ordered a set of inexpensive 225/45-17 Maxxis Victra VR-1 2 hundred treadwear tires and mounted them on our T4 Sentra for tires. The VR-1 Maxxis tires may not be widely known in SCCA circles. However, they are used by several road racing and song day organizations and feature validated records of maintaining as much as more than one hour of abuse on the track.
At less than $one hundred thirty consistent with a tire, they’re adding a good deal. So to seize statistics, we geared up the auto with an AiM MXm statistics acquisition gadget and AiM’s infrared tire temperature sensors. Admittedly, the AiM MXm statistics system was not our first choice — we initially deliberately used an AiM Solo 2 DL to acquire statistics. But a call to AiM became us directly to a distinct product: the MX.
Touted as a “compact data logger,” set up isn’t as sincere as with the plug-and-play, battery-powered Solo 2 DL; however, it’s almost as clean. It calls for some form of a mounting plate (we screwed it into a block-out plate at the dash) and needs to be linked to a 12v power supply. However, the gain to the MXm over the Solo 2 DL is that it lets in for the use of external sensors. Because of this, we ordered the AiM’s tire temperature sensor kit to plug into the MXM. The bump in cost between the 2 isn’t always outlandish: The MXM will run you approximately $1,099 vs. The Solo 2 DL’s $699.
AiM’s infrared tire sensors provide a 35-degree discipline of view, with the sensors measuring temperatures from -four to 248 levels F. The sensors fee approximately $one hundred each and plug directly into the MXm and AiM’s Race Studio software program, making the setup so straightforward even we should do it.
We did find out that distance from the tire’s surface makes a distinction in the temperature sensor’s readings, undoubtedly because of the quantity of floor area the sensor can see. We set up the passenger-aspect tire sensor almost an inch further from the tire’s floor than at the driving force’s facet to see what the difference would be. We saw top temperatures occasionally 40 levels lower than the sensor located towards the tire. Does this count number? Not so much, as we were searching out trendy temperature fluctuation, no longer free readings in pinpoint tire locations.
Knee Deep in Data
Data is inherently vain without something to evaluate it too. However, that doesn’t mean you need reams of statistics from multiple motors and tracks to drag from. In our case, we were comparing statistics on the T4 car over the length of a 25-minute race observed via a 90-minute enduro on the same day. Believe it or no longer, there’s plenty to research from that situation.
While there are many methods for studying statistics, for us, the bottom-striking fruit on this check was lap consistency. We pulled up facts from the enduro and observed a lap time variant of no extra than zero.776sec all through the very last forty-minute stint, with most laps falling inside a half-2nd window. We additionally located that the driving force became his fastest time of the day on the penultimate lap of the 90-minute enduro, showing that the Maxxis Victra VR-1 tires were excellent to the quit.
