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First off, is anyone else doing the 8 hr race?
Second, what tires have people run to last the full race? We were thinking of doing 1 set of new full thread RA1s, but didn’t know if we would have any issues with tire chunking or if it’ll just be squirmy. What have people done in the past?
i’ve no idea what is or isn’t allowed, but in the vir 13 hour two of the miatas i crewed for ran bfg r1. when they were pulled after 8 hours they looked incredibly good, could easily have lasted the whole race. a third miata on shaved ra1 burned through them in less than 5 hours.
We are looking at running an ra1 shaved to 5/32, should last all 8 hours. might burn through a left front perhaps. How is RA on tires anyway? Brakes?
andrew240z wrote:
hopefully the palacios will chime in, they are enduro experts and ra is their home track. i’d say it’s easy-to-moderate on tires and brakes (similar to vir) but eight hours from a set of shaved ra1s may be a tad optimistic.
Last year I found that we could get 6 hours out of a set of full tread R888’s. That was two 3 hour enduros. At that point the tires had a little bit of life left in them, but I sort of doubt they would have gone another two hours.
Per the NASA Enduro rules, you can run any tire that mounts on base class legal wheels. We ran 225/45-15 tires.
My guess is that you’ll be changing tires and front brake pads at around the six hour mark.
Yeah typically RA isn’t bad on tires and brakes but the most we’ve run in 1 sitting is 3 hrs.
Or Nitto NT-01 tires. James Clay is a big fan of those. I tried them for one enduro and decided that while they worked well and had some advantages over R888’s, they did require a different setup and behaved differently. One nice thing about the Nitto tires as compared to R888 is that when the Nittos get a bit too hot and greasy a few relaxed laps will bring them back. Whereas once R888 tires get greasy they don’t come back until they cool way down.
We ran a set of full depth R888’s last year on the Camaro in the 9hr and Brandon is still using them in HPDE. We were given a set of hoosier enduro tires this year and will try them for the 8hr w/a set of RA1’s as backup…
epalacio19 wrote:
It’s on like Donkey Kong™*, bitchez. 
[size=1]*Copyright by Nintendo Corporation 1983. All rights reserved.[/size]
Steve D wrote:
[quote]epalacio19 wrote:
It’s on like Donkey Kong, bitchez. ;)[/quote]
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/11/10/on.like.donkey.kong/
If you shave the RA-1, just have them leave more on the shoulder of the tire. Different places shave diffeent. Vilven leaves more on the shoulder. Appalachin shaves the shoulder down pretty far and it won’t last. Shave to 5/32 but leave a lot on the shoulder and you should be fine. Not that the cars are the same, but we went 25 Hours at Thunderhill on shaved RA-1’s on the factory five car, and also ran a team car at the same time on a set of 888’s. Each finished easily, but we have a lot more tire, less weight, and more power.
I would also flatten out the camber for the 8 hour substantially and would toe the car to zero.
-Scott
DriveGear crew is in with 2 cars. We have a couple rental drivers lined up and perhaps a celebrity guest driver, TBA. I will have e30, E36 Getrags, and E36 ZF rebuilt transmissions on hand BTW!!
There are photos in the enduro regs showing which “5 gallon” cans are legal. I have several that look like a combination of the “deemed legal” and “deemed illegal” categories so I will be using the OPM crew’s standard containers.