I was recently at an event where a Hoosier R6 disintegrated at high speed, leading to a serious incident. Does anyone know of any general problems with this tire?

 

It depends on the car and the track. Cup Car at Daytona? You need to give more info along like the car, track, tire size, air pressure, toe, and camber before anyone can help you.

 

were they brand new?

 

General problems?

The answer to that is no. Way too many track miles on them with MANY different cars with hardly any issues other than too short of a life for there to be a general problem.

Unique situations do exist as Matt alludes to.

 

Information left out was Front tire, Summit Point, front straight, late model high hp 911.

Agree with above. I have not seen any general issues with the R6. Summit Point is not notably hard on tires ether.

 

Left rear tire.

 

Unable to tell w/o knowing about pressures, alignment, environment, track conditions, etc.

 

I had one recently fail by bulging locally along part of the tread width in one location on the circumference. The tyre was maybe third to half worn. I have seen this one other time as well. The tyre didn't disintegrate, but the whole car shook severely around corners after this happened.

 

from my archives. I'm just a DE guy MPSC but same dangers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE95...ature=youtu.be

 

Good to know. Was told front. Front rear is important. Ether way would be hard to deconstruct failure without plugging in a bunch of missing info. Overall R6 a solid performer with a couple of narrow exceptions.

 

Understood. I'm not at liberty to provide specifics on this particular failure beyond what many people already know, so I figured I'd ask about the R6 to see if there might be a general problem with the tire (ie, failure rate significantly higher than average compared to other tires, not necessarily a high percentage of them failing). Of course, hard to infer a rate from anecdotal reports ...

 

I was told by my mechanic to stay away of R6's on cups because the sidewall could not handle the load on the rears.

Hoosier was supposed to be testing their new slicks last winter but I never heard the outcome.

 

+1. Similar failure left rear on my cayman

 

Do a search and you'll see many threads on R6 failures, usually on the left rear. They delaminate, or split at the interface of the tread and sidewall. This is especially common on high horsepower rear engined P-cars. I've had it happen many times. It usually happens at about 8-12 heat cycles, with plenty of rubber left on the tire. I've never had a catastrophic failure, but I check my tires between sessions. Once, at Watkins Glen, there was a stack of 4 split R6s with plenty of rubber just left in the garage.
I returned a tire to Hoosier for an analysis, and the say that higher pressures ( 38-40 hot) will make it less likely. As I said, a search will show pictures of the failures, and also give you an idea of how common it is.

 

Hoosier put out this safety bulletin a few years ago after several rear R6's failed on banked tracks. They now want you to run them at 40-42 psi hot....

http://www.hoosiertire.com/pdfs/bankedovalroad.pdf