I have 7000 miles on the OEM S-02's, with very mild driving style, and there is very little tyre wear except for the INSIDE of the fronts.

Since the tyres are uni-directional, I was thinking about swapping the left and front tyres. Basically remounting the tyres onto the rim in the opposite direction, so that they maintain their proper directions.

But more importantly, is their something out of line with my suspension?

Cheers,
Edward

 

Remounting will work fine and is a common practice with some race tires.

You might have your alignment checked for excessive negative camber (which BTW, can help handling at the expense of tire wear) and proper toe setting.

 

These cars come from the factory with negative camber, front and rear. Unless you have that adjusted, your tires will continue to wear on the inside. You sacrifice some of the handling advantages by reducing the camber but most will not push the car to those limits anyway.

 

I had a very similar problem at 7-8k miles. I took it to the dealer for an alignment and everything was within spec. In fact it was dead on the middle of the range for each of the settings - so I had them reduce the front neg camber to the lowest limit of camber so the tires wouldn't wear as quickly but not affect handling too much. I changed all 4 of my tires at that point but hung on to the OEM fronts and will "swap" them left to right when I put them back on once these are gone. As you said, there should be no issues since the rotation will be the same.

 

Actually you get get the tires to wear very evenly despite a heavy dose of negative camber.. you just have to drive figure eights all the time!

 

I had all 4 tires swapped around to maximize tread life and had a severe vibration. Took it back to the dealer (they were the ones who swapped 'em) and they rebalanced them on a machine in their Porsche dealership that applies a load to the tire tread while balancing. This helped a lot but not completely.

It appears that my problem was basically caused by not having the alignment checked when I picked up the car new. The settings were all over the map, causing inside wear on the right-front tire (no excessive camber or toe). Some of the tires had picked up some odd wear patterns, including cupping, that were causing my vibration. I was told that tires such as the S02s can have such problems due to their construction and design. I have no way to verify this but I'd have to say I believe it based on this experience.

I fixed the problem by putting new tires on...

 

I don't think anything is wrong with your alignment. I've seen exactly the same wear on the fronts on my s2000. If you look at photos of the car cornering you will see that the inside front tire is barely touching the road, and only on the inside of the tire - hence the tire wear we've seen. I suppose it's an artifact of the suspension geometry.

I'll only get about 8-10 thousand miles out of my fronts, and about two track weekends.

It's fine to swap sides.

 

I went throught the same thing with my front tires. When I took my car in for its first service just before 5000 miles (more than a year had passed), they recommended that I replace my front tires because the wear bars were showing on the inside. I went ahead and drove another 6000 miles on them before replacing all four just last week. There are pictures of both front and rear tires at about 9000 miles in the middle of this page on my web site.

Since I've now had my car aligned twice, once at the first service and once again at 11,000 miles at the second service with the new tires installed, I'll be able to see if the wear is any different. The front tires definitely get a workout on the mountain roads around here. Of course, it will probably take another two years before I find out, unless I take any more long trips. (My car is used strictly for fun.)
__________
S2000 Western States Trip

 

Speedster,

Check your tire pressure. I had the same issue early on and found that my fronts were underinflated by about 3 lbs.

I now keep the front tires at 33-34 lbs. and the issue has gone away.

 

I have roughly 17000 on my '00 and its almost time to replace my fronts... the tires are fine except for the inside. is this everyones experience? (replaced the rears at 11000)