Time Trials on 300 Treadwear Tires? Yes!

This guest post comes from Occam’s Racer.

Pineview Run holds a time trial series on Wednesday nights, called the Challenge Cup. This is a great chance for non-members to run the track, and for everyone to engage in friendly competition. The series has a unique classing system which uses the UTQG (Uniform Tire Quality Grading) treadwear value as the sole determining factor. The three classes are split like this:

• Street: 300+ UTQG
• Track: 200+ UTQG
• Race: under 200 UTQG

The UTQG rating is supplied by the manufacturers, and is thus total bullshit, especially in the 200 treadwear (TW) category. But everyone knows this, and so it’s still a level playing field. If you care about winning, just make sure you’re on the best tires in the category.

I’m interested in the Street category, mostly for the convenience of it. “Run what ya brung,” is how the saying goes, I’ll call it lazy and be fine with it. Also, my 1993 street Miata has only 110 hp, and this class is about the only place where high-horsepower cars won’t stomp on me.

My daily tire is the Yokohama S.Drive, but I recently purchased some Continental ExtremeContact Sport for racing in the rain. And I also have my RS4 race tires on hand. So I figured I’d take them all to the track in advance of the Pineview Challenge Cup, and see how the tires measured up.

Yokohama S.Drive

My 195/50-15 Yokohama S.Drives have a bit of use on them. The tread depth measures about 6/32″, from the 10/32″ they started with.

S.Drives are a popular tire on Miatas, possibly because they’ve been around a long time. There’s nothing exceptional about them, except the ridiculous sale price I got. I ordered them online at Walmart, and shipping, mounting, and balancing was free. Out the door they were $50 each, which is insane. I keep looking back for another sale like that, but haven’t seen one. Maybe this was a closeout. I don’t see this tire size on Tire Rack, there’s a 195/55-15 or 205/50-15 instead.

I’ve tracked the S.Drives a few times at NYSTand Pineview, and while they are on the slow side, I like the way they communicate. You can hear the howl reverberating around the facility. The S.Drives have a 300 treadwear rating, and these were what I planned to use these at the Pineview Challenge Cup races for the Street class.

I set the S.Drives to 29 psi cold, and on track they come up to about 35 psi. My laps are typically in the low 1:24s, but the track can be a lot faster if there’s some rubber down from other cars. We get a lot of rain in Central NY, so the track gets washed clean quite frequently. On this day my best lap was a 1:24.1, and so right in the expected range for what I consider my control tire on a clean track.

Continental ExtremeContact Sport

The Continental ExtremeContact Sport (ECS) are a newer tire that’s supposed to be a great rain tire, and also good in the dry. I had set them aside as my racing rain tires, not really intending to daily these. They have a higher treadwear rating of 340, but as you probably know, that’s not always a meaningful number.

The ECS also start at 10/32″, and the tires were brand new at the test. The other tires have had some use, so factor that into your armchair calculator.

I started the Conti ECS at 30 psi, which was definitely too high, as the center of the tire got significantly hotter than the sides. Nevertheless, they were faster than the Yoks, by a full second. I then dropped the pressure 4 psi and gained a half second, putting down a 1:22.6. That’s 1.5 seconds between the Yoks and the Contis. Wow.

The Contis feel a bit vague on turn in, but that could be me just not being used to them. They are also loud, but not quite S.Drive loud. They are on 7.5” wheels because I keep thinking I’ll autocross in the STS class one day. But I’ve said that before, and I just never do it. Anyway, I wonder if an 8″ wide wheel would stiffen up the sidewall some more.

Hankook R-S4

I just finished a two-day aero test at Watkins Glen with my race car and was curious how a 200TW would stack up against the 300s. The 225/45-15 Hankook RS4s are pretty well stretched on a 9″ wheel, but this is what a lot of Miatas use.

My best time on the RS4 was a 1:21 flat, 3.1 seconds faster than the S.Drive, and 1.6 seconds faster than the ECS. I expected the RS4 to be a good deal faster than S.Drives, what I didn’t expect was that the Conti ECS would split the two almost in the middle.

I’m probably not driving the RS4s to the limit yet, as they are only about half as loud as the other tires, and I expected more talking back. Maybe there’s another second in these, but that’s not enough for me to switch over into the 200-TW category against RE71Rs and Rival 1.5s.

Here’s a video of my first session on the RS4s. The 11″ steering wheel and manual rack make this tight course a bit of an upper-body workout.

Simulating G-forces and lap time

Just for kicks, I want to see the approximate lap time all three tires would do on different tracks, and to get that, I need the lateral cornering Gs so I can plug it into Optimum Lap.

I use an AIM Solo for data, which shows me how much grip the car has in every part of the track. But I don’t drive every lap or corner exactly the same, and the values spike here and there, so it’s not easy to get a steady-state value.

So I plugged my lap times into Optimum Lap and started adjusting the grip values until I got the lap times I got in real life. I started with the S.Drives and called that 1.0g, which is about how much Race Studio shows they grip, and also because it’s easier to view other tires as percentages when you start with 100. This makes the ECS 1.04g and the R-S4 1.09g. Another way of saying that is the ECS had 4% more grip than the S.Drive, and the R-S4 had 9% more.

I wondered what the lap times would be for larger tracks, so I used Optimum Lap to simulate two local tracks, NYST and Watkins Glen. I’ve included my simulated Pineview Run laps, which will let me play with other things like drag, lift, power and weight, at a later date, and find out the differences those changes make (a subject of a future post).

Tire	Pineview (real)	Pineview (sim)	NYST (sim)	WGI (sim)
S.Drive 1g	1:24.1	1:23.95	1:50.70	2:33.06
ECS 1.04g	1:22.61	1:22.54	1:49.27	2:31.41
RS4 1.09g	1:21.06	1:20.94	1:47.15	2:29.15

The 3-second delta between S.Drives and RS4s at Pineview Run becomes 3.5 seconds at NYST and 4 seconds at WGI. That’s somewhat surprising to me, I expected a larger gap because the tracks are roughly two- and three-times longer, respectively. But at Pineview Run, you’re on the sides of your tires all the time, so I guess it makes sense.

Conclusions and post-test notes

• Pineview Run is a really good place to test tires! You can get in a lot of laps to normalize the data, and it’s cheaper than most tracks. I’ll do more tire reviews in the future.
• This was only my 3rd full day at Pineview Run, and I’m still leaving time on the track. To keep the simulations accurate, I’ll have to fudge the values to reduce track grip in Optimum Lap.
• Even though the Conti ECS are 1.5 seconds faster than the Yok S.Drives, I probably won’t do the Challenge Cup on the Contis until I wear out the Yoks. Partly because I’m cheap, but I also want to keep the Contis at full tread in case I’m racing in the rain.
• When the Yoks are all used up, I’ll buy a new set of Conti ECS and use them for everything.