The idea is not new, but we’d never achieved it before. So we loaded up a race automobile and headed to the track to compete on two hundred treadwear avenue tires. The aim became to seize as much data as reasonably viable throughout a race weekend and use it to determine whether extremely high-overall performance road tires should withstand 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 after that, 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 plan for specific avenue racing training didn’t pan out, it undoubtedly 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 through techniques conceivable, such as 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 an 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.
They’re adding a good deal at less than $one hundred thirty, consistent with a tire. 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 deliberately used an AiM Solo 2 DL to acquire statistics. But a call to AiM led us to a distinct product: the MX.
Touted as a “compact data logger,” the setup 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 allows 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 field of view and measure temperatures from—four to 248 degrees F. The sensors cost approximately $ hundred each and plug directly into the MXm and AiM’s Race Studio software program, making the setup so straightforward that we should do it.
We discovered that distance from the tire’s surface distinguishes the temperature sensor’s readings 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 the difference. We occasionally saw top temperatures 40 levels lower than the sensor towards the tire. Does this count as a 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 compared 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 not, there’s plenty to research from that situation.
While there are many methods for studying statistics, 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 also 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 for the quit.
