Usually with the grippier tires, you go a little stiffer, but my car is on the soft side anyway and ran hoosiers pretty well for a few years.

Im sure there are some changes that could be made with the suspension, but there will not be much time to do anything this weekend. so, we will probably will be using the set up I have and see what we see. I imagine there will be some small differences between the tires, and the hoosiers will be faster. How much and what they feel like, is left to be seen.

 

Driver skill, or lack of it, will certainly affect things. If a driver is driving at 7/10ths and never approaching the limit, a tire compound change isn't going to affect much because the driver is limiting the speed of the car through the corner and not the tires.

 

The current Hoosiers are NOTHING like the Hoosiers you ran in the past. Far more like a proper racing slick. To optimize the tires, you'd probably need spring rate, damper, and alignment changes...but it doesn't sound like you've done much work optimizing things for the Toyos anyway, so I'd just run the Hoosiers and see what the differences are. If you don't see much difference, it won't be because the tires aren't a lot faster.

 

I was going to ask you what to expect.

No, i havent done any optimizing, but the car handles reasonably well. The only barometer is running against the WC guys at Laguna with more weight than them.

Prall, 7 place WC Touring car '05 in one of our 3 races. Brandon was there too.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...56922109&hl=en

So, I think the car being a little on the soft side is going to be fine, but if they grip too much, I would expect to be on the bumpstops even more than I am now. (but i have special springie bump stops, so they are my secondary springs ) Im full stiff on the sways, and full maxed out on bump and rebound on the shocks. If they have more grip, the car will be faster. Will it be optimized? Certainly not. How much faster is the question.

Now, what would you be looking for? If I come back with 1 second better, you are going to say, the car was not set up right or you were not driving hard enough. If im 2 seconds faster, the car is set up right, but must have been wrong for the RA1s, so maybe they are only 1 second faster. So, what will you be looking for from the video to see if im pushing them hard enough.
Ill have 3 camera angles to show what is going on with the tires. We know what my car does now there. It pushes through 3 and 9, and the rest is pretty good. That might just go away and buy me the extra time, ,plus more grip and better stopping everywhere else.

mk