Tyre situation, Need help.

[Adam_NAclubman]

Cheap tyres on stock rims and dont drive like a cock. That'll do you until you can afford to do the wheels/tyres at the same time

[Mactype]

Come around, and pick up my spare set of rims and tyres , cause your driving around on a rather dangerous tyre at present.

Work out what you want to do in the next week then.

Darryl

[Hellmun]

That's some major centre of the tyre wear. How much pressure are you running?

I'd save my semi's for the track personally...that's a lot of tyre and if your finding you need semi's for the road I'd be just as worried about keeping my license than having an accident. Throttle control is part of driving on the track too, brute forcing your way with Semi's is teaching you nothing on the road and is ridiculously expensive. Careful you don't get pulled up as well just for having them ...regardless of Dot approval you can get pulled up by cops. You can dispute it but I seriously would rather avoid that whole situation.

I'd just get the pair of good street tyres and as soon as I could afford it get the same on the front end later. While semi's can be used they are really not designed for it. They cost over twice as much and last maybe %20 as long. Plus everyday the car is parked in the sun your burning out the elastomers and it takes that bit longer to get any heat into them so they stick.

[Adam_NAclubman]

Adam, problem with that is that cheap tyres won't be able to handle the turbo. I think I'll stick to semis till I can afford new wheels as well, probably next year.

I'm not sure about your car, but all my turbo cars have been equipped with a responsible right foot. As long as you're sensible you wouldnt have any problems running a turbo MX5 on plain jane 185's, I ran some really cheap, really hard K-Mart 205's on the back of my FJ20ET DR30 for a year and a half and never had a problem

[TieNN89]

take it easy

turbo doesn't mean plant your foot

[[Will]]

I've run Toyo R881 on the road for a few months and while they are very grippy in the dry and better than most in moderate wet, they can change very suddenly to zero grip in very heavy rain where the relative lack of tread grooves fill up with water quick.

With a turbo on a RWD car, you will be able to spin the wheels with any tyre in the wet. Decent road tyres cost less than semi-slick and are quieter and more comfortable too. If you think 14\" and 15\" performance street tires are expensive, check out 17\" and 18\" performance tires!

I'd save the semi-slicks for track use - and as you've found out, semi-slicks like much lower pressures to perform since their sidewalls are already very stiff. Try around 23 - 29psi and watch your lap times fall

[Hellmun]

I can crack the car sideways anytime I generally want with a quick flick. Tyres have very real limits you need to be conscious of, especially in the wet. I find that on the expressway with the 215 wide sumitomo's if I hit a decent chunk of water the car doesn't have the weight in it to cut through the water so the steering goes dead light and you can end up aquaplaning easily. The semi's are similar in the wet to the dry, much higher limit but when you cross it..you tend to get punished much harder and much faster. It's a part of driving you can minimise with a good tyre but never remove completely. We don't have heavy cars with skinny tyres.

I havn't had 14\" rims on the mx5. So I can't comment from experience but I'd probaly look at some dunlop's. Not sure if they come in 14\" but I know Ian Vickers uses DZ101's and he does extremely well in the unmodified 1800 class (He's using 15\"s though). You could come up next mx5 trackday at wakefield and just check out what the fastest standard NA6's are running as each will have 14\" street tyres. Other than that I thought RT615's were 14\" but they're an expensive sports tyre. Not sure how cheap they are that small. They're not semi slicks by any means but they're pretty sticky for a road tyre and they last decently long.

Unless the GIII's are low on tread or have been set rock hard in the sun though... that tyre should be pretty dam good. Also you can get tyre slip on Semi's. By no means are you going to have them hot all the time on the street and the street surfaces in australia and especially sydney are quite poor.

Don't underestimate car setup as well. If your concerned about wet weather grip you really need to soften up the suspension a bit. Also you can to a degree induce a great deal of understeer with suspension tuning which is safer to a point.

(near hit those cones, remember them).

Not as well as the VW golf GTI I saw on the kerb outside the circuit

[ampz]

kuhmpo ecsta ku31. You drove mine on the run (granted they were on the 16s) but they were only $110 a corner.

Good in the wet, although they are a good street tyre, they are prone to graining on a spirited run. I haven't tracked them, but if they hold up like the cdrives gthen they should only get squirmyafter 4 laps.

You should know when you're close to their limits because they squeal like a stuck pig before they let go.

[Boags]

AznTien, is amazes me to see how you think planting your foot in a turbo car can cause a flat spot. In fact its planting your foot on the brakes that would do it, and spinning on a track.

Re-read his post. That isn't what he said at all. I agree with him; I really don't see why you need different tyres... What are you expecting from 6 PSI? I run at 6 PSI and it's more powerful but you still have the same speed limits to abide by (which you can get to fairly easily without a turbo).

I'm just a little confused, not trying to be a d!ck.

You're doing what I did too: get the turbo in as quick as possible with the first $$$ available and fix everything later (diff, brakes, clutch etc). You won't listen to me (as I didn't to those who warned me), but it is the wrong way to go about it.

I have a set of semi slicks for the track: R888 205/50/15 and I run 195/50/15 Yoko C-Drives on the road. If I take off aggressively I can get them to chirp without dramas. If I ease the foot in I can get away fast without chirp.

As AznTien said; "take it easy, turbo doesn't mean plant your foot."

I'd be happy to talk to you about the sh!tty tyres I had on before the c-drives, and the massive difference they made. PM if you want to talk; I went down the exact same road a year ago.

Boags

[Boags]

Yah I see what he means but I wasn't asking for a driving lesson, just some suggestions on what tyres are good and what are outright dangerous with a turbo

That's the point though; you can be outright dangerous without the turbo using R888 if you don't drive sensibly.

Show me a race car that will hold traction if you redline and dump the clutch. It just doesn't happen. I know you just want good traction/$$$, which is a good way to go, but at the end of the day you can smoke slicks if you try hard enough.

Happy to share experience, looking forward to your PM. I want to hear all about your plans actually, if I had my time over I would definately buy Begi.

I saw from your "My Ride" thread that you already have a pretty good brakes setup, sorry for not researching before posting.

Boags

[fattima]

I've got Falken RT615s in 14s and I'm pretty impressed with them, came in at $187 each fitted. I would tend to keep a set of R specs for the track and another set of tyres for the road if you can.

[[Will]]

Thanks for the replies.

So does a wider tyre actually give you more grip? I read in a few places that going wider makes the contact patch smaller or not much bigger. This is since the weight is spread more so it doesn't mush the tyre into the ground as much, so the contact patch gets wider but thinner too.

I don't get it, why would you go wider tyres then? Corvettes have like 375mm tyres, surely a wider tyre will give more grip. What about in the wet??

Contact patch stays theoretically the same with wider tyres if you run the same pressure. Pressure = Force/Area. Since the mass of the car and tyre pressure are the same, then the areas (contact patch) is the same. However, wider tyres have more thermal mass and surface area to radiate heat, so you can run softer compounds to generate more grip.

You can go too far with this concept for a given size car too and go so wide that you can never get your tires up to temp. I'm not a tyre expert, so there is probably many more effects in addition to what I've mentioned.

Corvette's can run wider because of the mass of the car + power/torque.

I've never had aquaplaining with the r888s in the wet unintensionally, despite all the rain we've just had. Except maybe a few weeks ago since theyre basically bald, but nothing unmanageable at all. The GIIIs I had to always be very careful in the wet as the car was so twitchy and a real pain in the round abouts. Couldnt imagine them with a turbo.

My GIII's have been quite good in the wet. I have had bad experiences with good quality tyres when they're old. I'd go with cheap new tyres over old hard good tyres any day. I once had a major oversteer moment at about 70km/h in a FWD Astina SP because I was running cheap Kenda tyres front, but old Dunlops on the rear. I was certain the the front would push first, but not the case

[Boags]

Ok When I say I want to be able to floor it without spinning tyres with 200whp, I dont meen clutch dumping from 7k, who does that?

Some people do. You just said you wanted it to take what you threw at it; this was the mental image I got.

What I want is to be able to take off like a sane person, then be able to floor it in a straight line through first and second without the wheels spinning. Its not too much to ask is it?

OK, you can (and I currently do) on C-drives. The aren't going to stick like semis in the corners, but they aren't crap and if you respect the clutch and diff the tyres will take the turbo.

Every time I go to mania and mention superchargers they just say turbos are way better beause they're faster. I say what about lag and they say you get wheel spin from 2000rpm. Well I don't want that. Is this wheel spin in 1st generally accepted in the turbo mx5 community?

I have no experience with more than 120rwkw (SP) so I can't say... Less than that though you have to be brutal with the clutch to get wheelspin at 2000, and it's only a chirp.

It sounds like you don't want to be brutal, so you should be fine with street tyres on the street.

Boags

[ampz]

your 1.6 clutch (standard, not heavy duty, etc)
Will make sure your tyres don't spin at 120rwkw or above....

[NMX516]

Forget the idea of semi's for the street. That will improve your wet weather traction on the road, reduce the purchase cost of a decent tyre, and increase your tyre life.

As you're not used to living with and driving a turbo'd car, get the best wet weather tyres you can!

A turbo doesn't suddenly mean you start loosing traction, your right foot controls that.