How To Choose The Right Tires For Drag Racing
How To Choose The Right Tires For Drag Racing – The tire temperature on the track should usually be about 20 degrees cooler than the track temperature. “Burn longer on colder days,” advises our source at Mickey Thompson Performance Tires & Wheels. “On hotter days, just smoke a little and brush them off. The shorter the burn-in, the less the rubber will wear, so the tires will last longer.” Photo by Evan Smith/Mickey Thompson Tires & Wheels.
Fairing vs. Radial is often the first decision for these racers, but there are additional factors to consider before they burn that rubber on the drag strip.
How To Choose The Right Tires For Drag Racing
It is as simple as this. “Racers are looking for traction, something that can move their car as fast as possible,” says Farron Lubbers of Hoosier Racing Tire, Lakeville, Indiana. Sounds easy enough.
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But while the goal is clear, the best choice for straight-line competitors isn’t always cut and dry, even for a class whose name (“small tire”) suggests the size of the build. So how do you know what special requirements and factors racers should consider when choosing racing rubber for small tire drag classes? We caught up with Lubbers and other tire experts to find out.
“There are a few things to consider when choosing a racing tire,” says Mike Crutchfield of Coker Tire, Chattanooga, Tennessee. The first of these is “the height, width, and circumference of the tire, as well as the construction, whether radial or bias ply.”
“Radials have come a long way in the last few years, but if a racer is dealing with edge surfaces and a lot of horsepower, a radial is hard to work with because it has to die,” Lubbers said. “That’s why there’s so much spray on the track at those radial events. But connecting a radius on an unprepared surface or edge track is inherently more difficult than a bias.”
“Definitely, in a no-prep situation, a bias ply tire will absorb more energy at the starting line,” says Jason Moulton of Mickey Thompson Performance Tires & Wheels, Stow, Ohio. “But it also absorbs energy down the track, which ultimately makes deflection slower than radial. We’ve seen people collect anywhere from five hundredths to a tenth of an eighth of a mile in radius. If the track conditions are good or the tuning setup can work with the radial, it will be faster.”
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Although they seem like separate considerations, tire size and construction are interrelated, particularly with the bias tape associated with the tires. Moulton says the bias strips grow at speed, up to an inch and a half at 150 mph. When determining how much tire will fit under the car, he recommended “no less than 3/4 inch of side-to-side clearance, depending on the suspension. For a leaf spring suspension or an old coil-spring suspension, it’s best to leave at least an inch.”
Moulton said the circumference of a bias tire can also vary, which is why the company writes the circumference on the tire tread. When buying a set of bark, “make sure they overlap within half an inch. If the difference is more, then in the case of a race car with a locked or wrapped rear end, the tires will try to steer the car in one direction or the other. You definitely don’t want that.”
Hoosier marks its bias ply tires with a reference number that correlates to the length of the tire’s roll when it leaves the mold and has gone through the company’s post-inflation process. When a kit is ordered, “we pull two tires with the same numbers on them and ship them together, so 9.9 times out of 10, if they’re inflated the same way when they’re installed, they’ll have the matching kit,” he said. Lubbers.
From there, the decision parameters “go into the horsepower level and the weight of the car,” Moulton said. In headlining classes, for example, “horsepower levels tend to be much higher, so racers want tires with a compound and sidewall that can handle the weight and horsepower. With a heavier car, upwards of 3,000 pounds in our world, and high horsepower, say north of 800, they’ll want something with a stronger compound and a stiffer sidewall. Hard sidewalls tend to scare people away. They believe that they will not absorb the necessary energy with their application. But the sidewall stiffener tends to keep the tire rounder and keeps the footprint a little bigger on the ground.”
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The 28×10.5-15 Phoenix PH18S was “engineered with Phoenix’s proprietary features and construction parts placement to improve performance and grip without prep racing in mind,” said our contact at Coker Tire. “With the F9 compound, this combination made for a very good tire for this type of racing, and also a great fit for weekend bracket racing.”
When racers “talk about tires, they only like to talk about hard and soft,” Lubbers said. But they should look for a tire “that has some stiffness. They want to get as much traction as possible, but they also need stiffness because these cars roll on wheels. They are usually not dead in the marginal state. Racers need something that won’t get jittery and get a wavy ride when it turns. That’s part of the toughness.”
On the track, a general rule of thumb for tire temperature is that it should be about 20 degrees cooler than the track temperature. “Burn longer on colder days,” Moulton advised. “On hotter days, just smoke a little and brush them off. “The shorter the burn-in, the less rubber will wear, so the tires will last longer.” This is true for both radial and bias tires, he said.
Between racing seasons, “keep them out of the weather and in a controlled environment,” Lubers said. “You don’t want them to freeze.”
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Moulton said to keep the air in the tires and keep the weight off them during the season, as this will help them keep their shape. Also, keep tires away from “high heat or high electrical sources such as a stove, welder, or air compressor,” he added. “It will prematurely age the tires.”
All of our sources agreed with Crutchfield when he said: “We do not recommend any type of chemical treatment for race tires. This can damage the integrity and ruin the rubber compound of the tire.”
“And don’t put them on chassis dynos,” Lubbers said. Jacking up the car and running the tires on rollers “creates all kinds of heat that will tear the rubber right off.” Wheel Considerations
When it comes to wheel selection, “wider is better up to a point,” Moulton said, “but it’s dictated by tire height and tread width.”
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“I wouldn’t put a 10-inch tire on anything less than an eight-inch wheel,” Lubbers said. “The final thing will be around the 10-inch wheel. A wider wheel is an advantage because it gives a better impression of the tire tread on the track surface.”
Securing the tire to the wheel with flange bolts or studs is recommended when the tire slides tire to wheel. Moulton says racers with wheels wider than the tread width should reach for the bumps to maximize the tire’s footprint.
“Some of these guys are running 28×10.5s on a 14-inch-wide wheel. As the bias tires grow up the track, they also try to pull the beads in.” If that happens, especially in low-pressure biased stratospheres, the bubble can “settle pretty quickly,” Moulton said. “It usually happens at the top of the track, which is the worst place for it.”
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