Ah ya sorry, forgot ya'll were talking about Solo. Pretty much, just gotta find a way of keeping BFG and Hoosier stickers on the car without upsetting the official lol.

 

Good point. I had my mind on tires, not necessarily the fact that winning is winning, and that's the most important thing.

 

Well, I finally picked up a set of 285s. We'll see how they work this weekend.

 

How'd they fare for you? I did some skid pad testing to scrub them and find out what pressures worked, and a test session before Tour on them this weekend and they were pretty amazing. They were 2.1sec faster from the morning session on 255 ZII's and I felt like I never quite figured them out fully, left a good 0.5sec on course.

 

Dallas,

what type of pressures are you running? cold/hot? My 285's are getting mounted as we speak. Going to try them at an even this weekend.

Eric

 

Hard to do a complete apples/apples comparison cause my car is stiffer than the "standard" setup, but 30psi front gave me an even slope on temp using a probe right off the skid pad.

Didn't time the BFGs, but ZII's ran 9.7 and 9.9 two lap average (CW, CCW) on the 200ft skid pad. Comes out to 1.3g and 1.25g. For comparison, a fully prepped STR Miata ran 9.4 and 9.5.

 

Low pressure....Interesting

I've been scouring forums trying to find info on these tires. The Stock class guys are seemingly having a harder time with narrow wheels and the wide section width of the BFG when compated to the forgiving nature of the A6 once mounted and so raw times are not as good.

I did find an *SP competitor in an s2K that found the BFG's to be fast and really good when mounted on a wide wheel. 275's on a 10.5/11x18

I'm mounting my 285's on a 10.5, so they should be just right. Getting an idea of a PSI starting point is what I'm looking for, so I'll start them low and see how they react.

Thanks

Eric

 

Yep, my hoosiers and various street tires have all been low when looking at roll and temp. But my setup, as with everyone who has really tested a lot of setups, is different than you'll find as standard.

 

Hey guys,

We've got a few events on these tires and are really liking them.

Are guys running these sticker from run #1 are are they giving them a quick scrub in? I've not figured out when it's fastest.

I've got a set now with 18 runs on them. I don't have enough data to tell me if they are still fast or are past their peak zone.

With a new set for Nats, I'm unsure if we should use them sticker or give em a quick scrub in the T&T on monday.

Eric

 

I scrubbed mine in on a skid pad, but access to one of them isn't quite convenient for most (and usually not for me either). In the past on Kumhos I would just drive them around the block a few times and find a parking lot to do some circles. Then just drive them the next day. They always sucked at first but got sticky within a few runs.

I remember the BFGs being better from sticker than kumho's and felt slightly quicker than my ZII's. On day two, they felt significantly stickier than day 1. I wouldn't really hesitate to just run a local event to scrub them in, but definitely not running fresh stickers at Nats.

Mine are at 45 runs now and still feeling great. Any difference is less than the noise of my skills as a driver.

 

Well I must say I'm embarrassed to admit how bad my car really was. And it wasn't until fixing it did I realize how far off it was.

It all started late last week when Blanton took my car to EvoD for a corner balance. OMG, it was off so badly. %70 of the weight over the front wheels. And an honest 400lbs MORE on one front corner to the other. Once that was resolved, we took it in for an alignment. Which wasn't off too much. But apparently one of the tie rod turnbuckles came loose and the whole rack had shifted 3" to the right! So one side had WAY more steering angle than the other.

No wonder this thing never wanted to turn. Geez I feel like an idiot.

Anyway, we ran the car yesterday at a medium sized/medium grip concrete lot. The car was transformed. When I turned the wheel, it actually changed directions LOL!

I started playing with tire pressures, because at 37 or 38 psi it felt like the tires were way over inflated. And were just skating and chattering on the surfaces. Plus the rear was crazy loose. Dropped down to 35 all around and that seemed to get rid of the sensation and added some grip a bit. Then I remember the other thread where you guys mentioned you were running them at 32psi. So I said screw it and dropped them down to 32psi.

BINGO! Hello new car! I can't believe what a difference it made! The car did EVERYTHING I wanted to. No drama, no fight. Just smooth, fast, easy and effortless driving.

Based on comparison to other drivers that I normally use for bench marking, I would say the car was roughly a full second or more faster on that 50 second course. This is all on a set of the old BFG's we started running earlier this year. With god knows how many runs. Top pax and FTD for the door slammers by a huge margin.

Moral of the story: put your car on the scales LOL!

 

Good stuff!

I know it's not apple-to-apple comparison, but somehow I knew that something had to be off. Our cars are similar enough (~3000 lbs AWD with 60/40 distribution) that it was odd that you were running that much pressure out of these tires. The variance was too high to make sense unless we had a different batch of tires, or there was construction/carcass inconsistencies. I found that 30-32 psi hot is the sweet spot in the front without any rollover.

On a side note, for autocross (autocross only) I like the unconventional way of not going for cross weight balance. Matching the sides LH/RH while keeping the distribution even seems to provide equal to superior performance. DG in his 'Autocross to Win' touched on the topic as a proponent of the practice... so some food for thoughts.

 

too bad you're not going to nats to find out how much better it really is.

 

I think he's in the BFG for Pros only camp though.

 

Is that the consensus? BFGs work for Pro's but hoosiers better for Tour?