Comfort Tires = Professional Level?

I heard this at least twice now, that if you aren't using Comfort tires then you aren't professional ('Well the pros use comforts so that is what you should use' is what I heard). Also, I've been in rooms that say 'Pro Only' and have a limit to Comforts. How is this limiting yourself to the crappiest tires a sign of superiority?

To me it's like saying that judges go around at a drift event (in real life) and scout the tires being used - and then give those with the lowest quality tires a handicap or bonus points.

The only reason that I can come up with for using lower quality tires in this situation would be to rack up higher points in a drift. However, I don't see how that makes you more professional either. All that is being done is a manipulation of the judging criteria within the game system. The same thing can be done in TXRD2 - just throw on low level tires on an AWD car and voilà.... you got mega points.

Am I missing the big picture behind this message that is being spread around? I hope everyone can explain to me what I'm missing.

I guess I'll never be professional if this is the case - but one fast amateur.

most drift comps like the d1gp for example are limited to certain types of tires being used...
in the early years of d1gp they are allowed to use R-tires and were quickly banned from being used.

FormulaD is allowed full on slick style tires. D1GP has to be a street radial from my understanding. Regardless, you should always run the tire with the most grip that you can handle throwing around.

Only reason people use comfort tires on GT5 is for the more realistic feel of grip, or lack thereof. GT has never been big on drift and kinda feels like it in GT5 too.

End of the day there are no restrictions on what tires you should use other than those on rooms, so use whatever you feel comfortable using, I personally use comfort softs for the better grip in higher horsepower cars but you use what you want and don't let people tell you what to use.

There is no 'pro' status on a video game because nobody gets paid to do it so they're just making excuses.

Thanks for the responses. I haven't been able to get my car (669hp 300ZX) to 'accept' comforts - presently I'm still using Sport Softs because of the grip factor.

why_spyder

Thanks for the responses. I haven't been able to get my car (669hp 300ZX) to 'accept' comforts - presently I'm still using Sport Softs because of the grip factor.

Click to expand...

By accept you mean your personal control over the car, I'd assume.

Either way, props to you for throwing a car sideways on Sports:Soft. Takes it to a whole new level. 👍👍

articzap

By accept you mean your personal control over the car, I'd assume.

Click to expand...

Yes, this is correct. I'm thinking my LSD may be fairly aggressive because it really shouldn't my gearing (set at 230).

why_spyder

Yes, this is correct. I'm thinking my LSD may be fairly aggressive because it really shouldn't my gearing (set at 230).

Click to expand...

I run pretty much locked differentials from my race cars to my drift cars. The ranges from slicks to comforts.

The reason why people uses confort tires is because they wear slower than sport tires.
I bet your tires last 2 laps on your overkill 300ZX.

Restricting tires is good, but only up to a certain point i think..
Rooms that restrict to only comfort hards most of the time you can guess how theyre driving if they need the easiest tires to drift on..

Try to go towards unrestricted rooms or at least up to Comfort Mediums.

Hope this helps.

articzap

FormulaD is allowed full on slick style tires. D1GP has to be a street radial from my understanding. Regardless, you should always run the tire with the most grip that you can handle throwing around.

Click to expand...

when i look at tires being used in formula d like toyo r1r and nitto nt05.....those tires look quite street radial to me

regardless of what kind of tires you choose, as long as you can link drifts like comforts then that's fine, but i highly doubt that's possible.

I'm curious to see someone drifting as smooth as with comforts with sports tires:!

To me, I could careless about what tire you're using. If you can throw your car around and control it without it being in control with a full soft slick, more power to you.

I just use comforts 'cause it breaks traction easier.

Beginners usually start with sport tyres once you get a little better you'll start using comforts and realise the difference lol.
But I disagree with the whole comfort = pro thing. Thats like saying FR drifters are pro only. Use whatever you want mate, just when you get exceptionally better go get some comforts.

I think Comfort hards are ****e as you can't get anywhere near as good entry speeds and speed through the corner.

Not all just about angle especially if your just crawling around the corner.

I use comfort mediums- Sport hards or Sport mediums. All depends on track and car really.

I only use comforts because as previously stated, they last longer. On the sports hard at Tsukuba I was changing tires every 3-4 laps when a set of comfort hards have lasted 20 laps and I still could have done another 10-15 laps. Also I find the the sports hard have too much grip.

articzap

FormulaD is allowed full on slick style tires. D1GP has to be a street radial from my understanding. Regardless, you should always run the tire with the most grip that you can handle throwing around.

Click to expand...

I've been shooting motorsports for professionally for 7 years. I've shot both Formula D and D1 as well as Nopi drift and several other smaller regional series. I can tell you from experience that both Formula D and D1 guys use high performance street radials almost exclusively... I've NEVER seen anyone in Formula D use a slick tire. When I shot drifting the first time, I was actually quite surprised that they were using such high end tires... but after a while I realized why. First, grip,.. i bet you're saying, "why would you want grip?" I thought the same thing... but these guys want the grip because it gives them the control t put the car exactly where they want to. The downside of a grippier tire is that they wear out faster... but that doesn't matter to them. The biggest sponsors in Formula D are the tire companies and the top guys all switch tires after every round. Even the privateer guys have some sort of tire deal and the companies pay them big bucks so that they have their best tires on the car and can win. Win on sunday, sell on monday.

Trust me... professional drifters are bad ass drivers.... they can drift anything on any tires. I've done a ride along with Nomoken in his Blitz car... it was amazing. I've never seen such amazing control.

TSLRich

I've been shooting motorsports for professionally for 7 years. I've shot both Formula D and D1 as well as Nopi drift and several other smaller regional series. I can tell you from experience that both Formula D and D1 guys use high performance street radials almost exclusively... I've NEVER seen anyone in Formula D use a slick tire. When I shot drifting the first time, I was actually quite surprised that they were using such high end tires... but after a while I realized why. First, grip,.. i bet you're saying, "why would you want grip?" I thought the same thing... but these guys want the grip because it gives them the control t put the car exactly where they want to. The downside of a grippier tire is that they wear out faster... but that doesn't matter to them. The biggest sponsors in Formula D are the tire companies and the top guys all switch tires after every round. Even the privateer guys have some sort of tire deal and the companies pay them big bucks so that they have their best tires on the car and can win. Win on sunday, sell on monday.

Trust me... professional drifters are bad ass drivers.... they can drift anything on any tires. I've done a ride along with Nomoken in his Blitz car... it was amazing. I've never seen such amazing control.

Click to expand...

For someone that's been shooting drift events for seven years i'd expected you to know how to spell 'Nomuken' properly. Kinda part of the job don't you think?

Mysterious R

For someone that's been shooting drift events for seven years i'd expected you to know how to spell 'Nomuken' properly. Kinda part of the job don't you think?

Click to expand...

perhaps.... I did a ride along with him, but really not that familiar with him, though, as D1 really hasn't done much of anything here in the states. I've shot 3 D1 events. 1 in cali, 1 in vegas and 1 in NJ. I've shot FD the most and know those guys fairly well.

It is pretty simple really.

Most drifters use comfort tires, also in tandem.
With other tires, you might be faster or slower carrying the drift through a corner. That way, its impossible to drift at the same speeds.

Second, you could use other tires, but in rooms, if you pop up behind another drifter, with other speeds, accidents happen. We don't want that. You can avoid all of this, by practising comfort tires.

And control... I drift every car of mine on Comf Hard tires. From my Ac 247 with 800 bhp or my Sileighty. If you question my control over the Ac, send me a pm on PSN, or watch this vid: Gonales Tsukuba Drift (youtube).

I can only speak of the Japanese D1GP and the fact is that slick tires are banned, every single one of them are using street tires, which are comforts in GT5.
Sports tires seem to be semi-slicks, which i haven''t seen in any D1 even that I've ever watched.

If you need to use sports soft tires then your car is too powerful...
I run comfort hards on my 512bhp ISF and it drifts fine, it makes it a lot easier to tandem if you all run the same tyres...

kotkas

I can only speak of the Japanese D1GP and the fact is that slick tires are banned, every single one of them are using street tires, which are comforts in GT5.
Sports tires seem to be semi-slicks, which i haven''t seen in any D1 even that I've ever watched.

Click to expand...

Sport tyres are not semi-slicks. They are more or less road legal track-day tyres such as R888s etc which alot of drift cars use on the front. 90% of the cars in the Irish pro-drift series use R888s or Silverstone RS or RRs on the front and even some on the back but that's vein banned now as it's unfair as people have too much grip with them and too hard to keep up in the corners when twin-battling.

There is no such thing as a car being too powerful, that's just nonsense. Use whatever level of power you like and tyres you can control well with.

I only use comfort hards on crappy cars with only 60-200bhp. Anything more than that I use mediums, softs or sport tyres on.

I have different cars setup for different tyres. A few guys I drift with only use comfort hard which is fine but not for me, i can't be arsed with slow-ass drifting.

My FD Spirit R gets the most drift action and i use Sports soft on the front and comfort soft / sports hard depending on the track. I have a fair bit of real life drift experience (im not all that good but its safe to say i've a fair bit of experience) and if we could afford semi slicks all round then we would do it!

I've drifted with a few of you here. I run sport hard or comfort soft on my c63 and tandem fine with GOOD comfort hard drivers. There's a lot of comfort hard drivers who can't keep a drift going because they're going to slow. And they mess me up a lot. But if they can keep a line, then it's easier for me since I usually chase.

I use grippy tires because it's easier to catch up to someone. Either in a drift mid turn or down the straight and doing a dive. I find when I lead though, rarely can anyone keep up haha. So I usually chase.

To all the people using sport tires, what kind of controller do you use?
Steering wheel or the Dualshock?

I work for Europes highest level drift series. I drive in Europes highest level drift series. I also Judge professionally accross Europe, so I think I'm reasonably well qualified to answer this.

In real life, there are several championships that allow 'Slicks' and similar and yet NO-ONE uses them. Why? Because they don't provide progressive traction and make most cars almost impossible to drive. I know a few people who have tried to use them, one had a large accident in the processs, one had a catastrophic tyre failure which caused over a £1000 worth of bodywork damage, and the other failed to qualify for the top 16 for the first time in his career. All went back to road tyres immediately.

In our main series, most drivers use normal road tyres, the equivelant of Comfort Hards, for battles and pretty much ALL of them use them for qualifying.

When things change, is in the battles. Some drivers will use super soft track tyres, Driftworks use the Federal RSR for instance, a couple of teams use the Maxxis MZ-1 Drift, I and a couple of others choose to use Kumho V70A's. This is because in the battles, any speed advantage is a good thing, but it usually has some effect on the performance in drift, reducing overall angle and smoke.

The fact is this, drifting in QUALIFYING is mostly about ANGLE and SMOKE. Therefore you use the tyre which allows the most of each (comfort tyre). Speed during solo runs is irrelevant to a point, as the two or three extra miles an hour a 'sport' tyre gives is not noticable to the judges (and in real life it IS only 2-3mph). The extra grip provided by the 'sports' means that with any given power in a drift car, you will be able to hold more angle and produce more smoke with a 'comfort' tyre because you can spin the wheels more. Using a 'Sport' tyre in qualifying will only hurt your score in 90% of championships.

So why do we use them in battles? Well, in battles, it is an accepted fact that both drivers are trying to go more quickly than in qualifying as you are trying to beat the other driver. As a result, while trying to find grip and traction, your angles and smoke levels are inevitably lower than in qualifying, this is because, as most people know, grip drops with the amount of wheelspin (more spin = less grip). Because of this, what you find is that, drifting on a 'comfort' tyre while trying to find speed produces similar results to drifting flat out on 'sports', the only difference being that you can queeze a tiny bit more speed out of the sports.

In real life, the differences in speed are in fact, quite negligable. A top level drifter on 'comforts' will be easily able to keep up with a mid level drifter on sports. The problem arises from the fact that the same IS NOT true in GT5. Sports in GT provide SIGNIFICANTLY more grip than comforts, meaning that the closing speeds on track are just massively unrealistic. In real life even slicks don't provide as much extra speed over 'comforts' as sports do in GT5. The difference is the way the tyre relinquishes it's grip and the way it recovers it. As a result, many of us who are 'pro-level' (i don't say pro as, like someone said above, none of us get paid to play GT5) will pick a tyre that MOST can drift on (comforts) and limit a room to that so that people can join in knowing that everyone is going to be the same speed and enjoy a bit of twinning.

I actually often find that most people who want to use sports are actually terrible drivers and can't link a circuit up in any way, just drifting individual corners, which frankly is pooh LOL They seem to thrive on the argument that they are 'fast' but they clearly don't get that drifting is not about outright speed. The main point being, I have NEVER found someone who can drift a course better on sports than they can on comforts.

Once you can link an ENTIRE track on comfort hard, then you progress to comfort medium, then onto comfort soft. If you can STILL link the entire track on comfort soft, THEN go and try to drift on Sport Hard's. But until you've done that, I'd be willing to bet money that a lot of the guys on comfort hard will hand you your ass in every battle you have

DaveM-sport

Sport tyres are not semi-slicks. They are more or less road legal track-day tyres such as R888s etc which alot of drift cars use on the front. 90% of the cars in the Irish pro-drift series use R888s or Silverstone RS or RRs on the front and even some on the back but that's vein banned now as it's unfair as people have too much grip with them and too hard to keep up in the corners when twin-battling.

Click to expand...

LOL R888's and V70s etc ARE semi slicks dude. At least as we define them

And for the record, people who stagger tyres are usually crap because they don't understand the fact that a car needs BALANCED grip LOL There are times (HUGE angle usually) when you want the front tyres to slide slightly. Having a grippy tyre on front and rubbish on the back just reduces a car's potential performance for the sake of allowing the driver to not have to balance the car on turn-in.

gmsron

I've drifted with a few of you here. I run sport hard or comfort soft on my c63 and tandem fine with GOOD comfort hard drivers. There's a lot of comfort hard drivers who can't keep a drift going because they're going to slow. And they mess me up a lot. But if they can keep a line, then it's easier for me since I usually chase.

I use grippy tires because it's easier to catch up to someone. Either in a drift mid turn or down the straight and doing a dive. I find when I lead though, rarely can anyone keep up haha. So I usually chase.

Click to expand...

The reason they can't keep up is that the difference between 'comfort' and 'sport' tyres in GT5 is unrealistic. No-one on comfort hards will EVER keep up with somone on 'sport's as far as I can see. Come for a skid this evening, I've been wanting to find someone who can REALLY drift on sports tyres so I can test some things like apex speeds etc. and see how big the differences are. Fancy helping out?

Everything has been said by TwinturboCH...

TwinturboCH

The reason they can't keep up is that the difference between 'comfort' and 'sport' tyres in GT5 is unrealistic. No-one on comfort hards will EVER keep up with somone on 'sport's as far as I can see. Come for a skid this evening, I've been wanting to find someone who can REALLY drift on sports tyres so I can test some things like apex speeds etc. and see how big the differences are. Fancy helping out?

Click to expand...

Oh I know they can't keep up because of the difference between comforts and sport tires. It's not because of skill. If they can link the whole track with comfort hard. Then that's cool. Use what's best for you.

You can get a feel for what tires they're using watching their drifts. If not, I'll check the menu to see what they're using. If it's a mainly comfort hard room. I'll switch down to soft.

I mainly drift autumn ring mini reverse and tsukuba. I chased you most of the time on Grand Valley speedway. It was my first time there. But chasing you gave me a good example of someone who can carry drifts through corners using comfort hards. I'll have to learn that track next .

I probably won't be around until 7 EST. OR 12 midnight GMT. I'll help out for sure, if it's the two tracks I'm familiar with.