Putting heat into your Tires for auto-X
 

yeah I had an issue this past weekend I could not get any heat into my tires .

there were alot of people at the event , and quite a long time between runs . only people warming their tires were double driver cars

I dont have Rcomps , but I do have hankook R-s3's which like to be warm . and the hottest my tire got was 80F because I spun :lol: and that was ONE tire !

every other run my tires were at 77 F ( used a tire Pyro ) after the run and back to the 60's by the time I was up again.

So I figured there has to be something ( short of F1 Tire warmers ) to get them warm . Do you people with Rcomps which also like to be warm have any way to warm them up that you'd like to give out?

Tire warmers (ie heating blankets, not co-drivers) are not allowed in SCCA autocross. Most of the time, r-comps are fairly sticky even when cold, but you can do a few things:

Running smaller tires lets them heat up faster, but you'll probably be trying to cool them down by the end.

You can get some heat in your drive wheels by spinning them a bit at the start.

You can get tire blankets that retain heat, and keep them on the car in grid until just before you run.

Thank you , and yeah I got the spinning part down LMAO

Seems like everyone likes co-drivers as it gets the heat where you want it in the tire.

I don't know if you want to be the guy that pushes it to see if he gets protested-

but perhaps your tire blanket was a one piece affair that went all around the car and happened to fill the gap at the front and sides of your car.

I. Exhaust manifolds and muffler systems are free, except that they
must be quiet and terminate behind the driver.

Heat from an exhaust terminating under the car and waste radiator heat from idling the car might find its way into your tires by accident in between your runs.

6.11 PREHEATING TIRES
Pre-heating of tires prior to competition by electrically heated covers or
by similar means is prohibited.

Too much work for most people when you can just get street tires (R1R) or DOT-Rs that work well when cool (Hoosier A6).

The F1 tire warmers bit was a joke.. LoL ! yeah I live in miami , NORMALLY Idont have issues getting warmth into the tires the pavement alone heats them up on a nice spring day with temps at like 90 , But I was curious since I thought Rcomps needed to be heated up to really grip . as to what people did on those . But I see why the A6's are so popular now LOL

RS3s are going to do that...

over driving like a crazy person for the first run or 2 might work well

tire blankets would also help... (won't loose as much heat between runs)

So would having a second set of tires for cold weather (Toyo R1Rs? :) )

or just asking one of your friends to co-drive your car :p:


This is why I run RS3s on the front of my corolla and R1Rs on the back... RS3s love the heat (my corolla is brutal on front tires), but would never heat up on the back...

yes indeed I have concidered the R1R's But I'm the kind of person that likes to work with what I got LOL . and the hankooks are quite a bit cheaper then teh R1R's since tires are a semi year thing when driving the car kind of hard . but like you said it takes a run or two to warm up normally even in miami , But last event just was bad they never got up to temp which I hated LOL so I was wondering if I could turn them on a little sooner somehow .

R1R should be the same price as the R-S3.

In case you want to change later-

Best price on Toyo race tires is "T i r e s D i r e c t . N e t"

R1R has a 245/35-17 that helps with gearing.

Yeah there was a team that put one of those tremal blanket around the car at the Solo Nats. and was 2 sec faster then the rest of the feild. After the first run it was protested and demed "Preheating"

I found that my lovely (cough) all-seasons were only warming the inside edge of the tires. Mind you this is on stock suspension and alignment angles. However, the wait times between runs today were dramatically long. about 35 people per run, so at about 53s average run with someone leaving the gate every 25s, tires never really saw good temps...

You can't have a thermal blanket around the car when the car is running, as that is considered "active" heating. Putting a blanket around the car after it is shut off is OK.

-Andy M.

What pressures are you running? I'm not sure how long your runs are, but have you tried running lower pressure to make the tyre move around more at the beginning of the run?

That will generate heat and bring temperature up more quickly.