http://www.scca.com/assets/12-fastrack-may-solo.pdf

Please write an email to the SEB regarding the proposal to limit ST tires to 200 tread wear.

It appears to me that somebody is complaining about the 195 Toyo and the SEB can't figure out a good way to exclude this tire so they are proposing throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

 

 

Stupid. The second this passes, the second all the manufacturers re-stamp all their Summer Tires 200TW. The number doesn't mean anything....their are no defined standards for labeling a tire XXX Tread wear. If it were to pass....welcome to the spec tire ST classes because for the short term the Star Spec is the only tire to have really.

 

^What he said. Everything under 200 will just get relabeled a 200TW tire and stay the same or they'll claim to change and improve the compound in such a way that now a 200TW tire grips like a 140TW tire!

 

Umm... why don't they just exclude the 195 Toyo vs. a major rule change such as that? I'm betting this is to just make all the whining go away.

 

If you exclude one item from the rule even though it technically fit's the requirement then it just puts some other tire on top and forces the same problem. Only way I see it to be fair is to change the rule completely.

 

The precedent was set with the pirelli back in the day.....

 

Tire manufacturers don't care about our rules. Really. Nobody is going to change a tread wear rating for solo.

 

If it passes we'll all be running Star Specs then; no biggie for me since that's what I ran before the RS3s it's just it'll hurt the wallet a tad more. RS3 prices will likely drop and hopefully can use those from track/HPDE days. I would rather not see the rule change go through though. The Toyos are only really used on the much lighter cars or when the weather is cool/cold/wet. The get greasy after the 1st/2nd runs in the summer anyway.

 

On top of that, even if they did, it's not nearly as simple as just changing the number on the side of the same tire. The autocross market is a tiny proportion of the overall high performance market. Most non-autocross / non-track day enthusiasts get very upset if their tires wear out in a few thousand miles. If we keep raising the minimum treadwear rating, eventually we'll pass a point where it's infeasible for tire manufacturers to stamp that number on the sides of their existing ultra-high performance rubber, because it will become too tempting for naive enthusiasts to buy them thinking they're long-lasting, and the pain resulting from their discovering the opposite will become too much. Keep in mind also that the manufacturers presumably incur a recertification cost whenever they change anything about a tire, potentially even for something as simple as changing the treadwear rating.

Having said that, I have no idea where that threshold is. 200? 300? 5 million?