I think with rain this afternoon in California, we will get some feedback on the rains.

jim flynn wrote:I think with rain this afternoon in California, we will get some feedback on the rains.

I won the Gen2 race today in Fontana on Hoosier H2Os. The two guys who finished ahead of me yesterday ran Goodyear wets today. I was drafting one of them in between NASCAR 1 and 2 and he looked unstable at moderate speed where I was WOT the whole oval section and didn't feel bad at all.

I was unable to match my fast times in the dry, but the better drivers in Gen3s were only a few seconds off of their dry tire paces the day before.

It wasn't raining real hard when we went out, but there was standing water in a few places and the H2Os did fine for a hack driver like me.

Cheers,
Chris

bimmer635csi wrote:

jim flynn wrote:I think with rain this afternoon in California, we will get some feedback on the rains.

I won the Gen2 race today in Fontana on Hoosier H2Os. The two guys who finished ahead of me yesterday ran Goodyear wets today. I was drafting one of them in between NASCAR 1 and 2 and he looked unstable at moderate speed where I was WOT the whole oval section and didn't feel bad at all.

I was unable to match my fast times in the dry, but the better drivers in Gen3s were only a few seconds off of their dry tire paces the day before.

It wasn't raining real hard when we went out, but there was standing water in a few places and the H2Os did fine for a hack driver like me.

Cheers,
Chris

Congrats Chris! See you in 2017!

There was way less spray behind the Hoosier cars. It is pretty obvious both from driver feedback and speed differences that we are going from a really poor rain (as evidenced by everybody who lives where it rains complaining) tire to a really good one.

I have had a lot of success on the Goodyears, but always felt they required a lot less finesse, both in driving and setup than the Yokes and I think even more so with the Hoosiers. They behave so much differently and in a lot of ways opposite to the Goodyears, I think we will have a lot more fun and more exciting racing coming up...

Rain tires! We have REAL RAIN TIRES!!! Fontana is pretty difficult in the rain with a lot of standing water (a lake is more like it just before going onto the front straight.) It had rained before our race and had light rain early in the session, with drying conditions near the end. I could not believe the grip level given the conditions, with my best laps about 6 seconds off my best dry time (and still some dicey conditions in a couple of places.) Took a while to trust that we could still go flat through the oval at over 122mph. Braking was amazing. Still plenty of tread on the tires at the end (expected to have killed them given the times being run).

BTW, the SRF time gap between Hoosiers and Goodyears looked to be nearly 10 seconds a lap (Gen3's lapped the brave guy running the Goodyear non-Rains...)

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Denny, in the past we saw significantly more wear on the rears than the fronts. What have you seen or anticipate with the new tires?

Thanks! Pat

Pat, I anticipate the same.

I ran through my first set of Hoosiers over three test days (~14 sessions) with the right rear giving out first (outer shoulder worn to first layer of cords at recommended camber settings). I ran another session on the front tires during a 4th test day, with a similar wear on the right front (Thunderhill has a lot of high load left hand turns.)

Based at least on this initial experience, the front tire life appears to be only slightly longer than the rears. Your mileage and wear rate, of course, will be affected by your setup and driving style.

What I did find was pretty consistent performance right to the end. The wear indicators are pretty accurate; once they're no longer visible you'll be at the cords (and performance will drop off sharply as the top layer will start to peel back under load.

If you run at tracks that wear primarily on one side, I'd suggest swapping left-to-right to extend to the life a bit (before you get down to the last 1/32nd at the wear indicators). Ideal camber (for wear) seems to vary based on grip level as well. Still need to do more performance testing to confirm ideal compromise between wear and performance. Pretty impressed with the consistency from second session on (sticker tires can be a handful at least for the first 3-5 laps as grip comes in gradually and may not be at the same rate front-to-rear.)

Our experience as far as front to rear is the same as Bob's. No more multiple sets of rears per single set of fronts, I expect. But it seems the fronts wear a little more evenly from inside to outside...

RR Hoosier after 3 test days and ~14 sessions on track. Performance was within 1/2 second of best time up to this point.

IMG_0520 by bobsrf51, on Flickr