Bridgestone was at Crow's this weekend. Chatting with the tech, 120-150 degrees is what he described as the sweet spot. We also asked about rollover and they said (as usual) not to let the tire roll-over past the triangle sidewall markings.... then I walked past the FoST that Laughlin was driving and noticed roll-over scuffing all the way down and far beyond what seemed reasonable. And Scroggs' FS ride, those tires were destroyed (corded in fact), crazy amounts of roll-over.

 

Wow, that's good to know. Sounds like the re71r is a tire I will not be purchasing.

 

Interesting part for RE71s is that once I started rolling over the arrows, they got faster...go figure

 

You should be if you want to go fast on street tires

 

By the way... This is what our 285/30/18s looked like after 28 runs at El Toro and 6 at Crows. Need to figure out the issue, as the 275/35s didn't wear this drastically. This was on the rear of an FS E92 M3. The worn side is the inside.

 

interesting. I think I can attest to that, or even on the lower side of temps. I had heard that they loved heat, and I thought great - the evo loved generating it. sounds like I'll be spraying pretty regularly though.

oddly enough, I have zero problems with rollover, even on the mini with -0.6 degrees of front camber. will test the minis temps this weekend if it's dry/similar conditions. I think most of the evos heat is generated under braking

 

You also have to take Crows wear with a grain of salt. The surface is far more abrasive than most and tire wear is probably about twice as fast. That's what I experienced on r-compounds at least.

 

Track days bro. That comment about 120-150* being optimum temp, and how they worked on my friends Evo X at the track Saturday has confirmed that I do not want these tires. They fall off pretty bad after about 7-8 minutes on course.

 

Ah ok, for track I hear that they're ultra fast for a 200tw street tire (on par with NT01), but are rendered useless pretty quickly.

 

If you're out for fast lap in 200tw tire class, and you're badass, you could put in an easy warm up lap, a flyer, then a cool down lap, F1 qualifying style. But if you want to do HPDE's and be out on good tires that don't fall off the cliff for a 20-25 minute sessions, you need something with more heat tolerance.

 

I wouldn't buy them specifically for track sessions either.

Has anyone tried the new Rival S recently on one of our cars? My STI friend runs them and likes them quite a bit. I liked my original Rival (non-S) several years ago, but they lacked the feedback of tires like the ZIIs or the RE-71R.

Nope, when I'm on site I'm only concerned about going fast.

Realistically I have no idea if I'm heat cycling the tires out or not, but I don't get the impression that they've heat cycled out. I'm almost out of tread depth on my 245s and they're still quick enough for almost-but-not-quite top PAX at local events. This is the same set that has seen 150+ runs, 6000+ street miles, and sat out in the freezing garage without being bagged at all because I didn't expect to be using them again.


I'm hopefully good to go on my 265 setup with the new SuperPro bushings. Now I just hope that I don't start running into fender contact issues.

 

and you're spraying every session?

 

I ran the Rival S on an STU Evo last year (Jim3142's car). They seemed to be a lot more forgiving than the RE71Rs, with what seemed like the same amount of grip. We didn't get a chance to run them back to back at the same event though. We had fresh sets of both at Nationals and ultimately decided to run with the BFG mostly due to lack of seat time with the Bridgestones.

 

Man, that is a bit too much...you would think that wider one would resist a bit better than the narrower one,,,

 

I spray after every single run. Even if I soak the tires a couple times in between runs, there's still plenty of heat deeper within the tire carcass. Tire pressures may jump 2psi during the run, but I can never seem to reduce that pressure more than about 0.5psi at most just by spraying the tire.

On hot days I'll even throw ice in the sprayer for some extra help.

If anyone thinks there is a better way here I'd love to hear some theories, but this is the routine I've settled on for our local events. Like I said, we tend to get a lot of runs (5-6 per heat, 10-11 total for the day) so this is geared toward tire temperature management for those 4th, 5th, and 6th runs more than anything. If I was just doing 3-run heats I'd probably spray less.