vt951

Anyone here have experience running Kumho V710's on a 951 in mixed autocross / DE usage? I'm just curious how many autocrosses and/or DE days they would last.

I know it depends a lot on the setup of my car and how hard I push it, etc. My car is stock under the hood right now, with some mild suspension upgrades (250# springs, 28mm torsion bars, koni shocks, 968 m030 sways). I would probably run 245-17's up front and 275-17's in rear.

For the $1000 cost of these tires (incl heat cycling and installation), I'm hoping they would last me a whole season (about 5 auto-x days and 4 DE days). Anything less than that, and I'd probably just go with Yokohama Advan Neova's, which have much greater treadwear.

Techno Duck

Im not to sure about DE, but i have about 100, 60 second auto-x runs through mine and they still have decent rubber left (they were flipped on the wheels at 60 runs to maximize tread life). After about 60 runs they start to heat cycle out and get consecutively worse. Even at 100 runs through them, they are still plenty grippy, but nowhere near what they were new.

Scootin159

I highly doubt they'll be any good at DE, considering they were specifically designed for short auto-x runs. I know that people using them need to wet them down when doing consecutive runs to keep them from overheating... which means that at a DE you would need to find water to drive through every 120 seconds or so to keep them from overheating.

Outside of this, they should easily last an entire autox season. I've heard you really could run them for 2 or even 3, but that eventually they'll be so heat cycled that they'll be worse than street tires. It's the heat cycles that kills them, not the wear.

xsboost90

i know my victoracers did awsome at autox and after they had been heat cycled a season and a half, i did a couple DE's on them and they seemed great because they were alittle harder. I chorded them the third DE though.

vt951

Thanks for your helpful comments everyone. So it sounds like the V710's won't last too well for DE's. I guess Toyo RA-1's would be my pick for DE's (performance per $), but I've heard they are very difficult to get up to temp for auto-x. Sounds like I should probably stick to street tires for DE and auto-x for now, since there aren't any competition tires that are well suited to both.

Scootin159

While RA-1's are hardly the optimal choice for autox, they're a world better than street tires. I used them all last season, and they were hard to get heat into... but even cold they were substantially better than street tires.

One trick I did is when we were doing doubled heats (i.e. run once, get back in line, run again, then work), if I waited until everyone was done with their first runs, and almost everyone's seconds, before doing my first... that when I did my second run, the line was short enough (2-3 cars) that the tires were still warm from the first run. Not really legit at any level higher than regional though, where there's a mandatory 5 min wait between runs for this very reason, but regionally it made a .2-.3 second difference.