Hi Imari.
Can I just ask if you've had any real track experience of pushing a high-powered car over the limit and observing how the tyres wear out?
Just curious. This whole debate over FM5's tyre wear and fuel consumption is getting rather interesting.
Nope. I've had two track days in a MX5/Miata.
The Mazda and Alfa clubs are pretty strongly aligned in Melbourne, to the extent that they do track days together. I've never talked to anyone who mentioned their tyres wearing out in one day, but that doesn't mean they're not out there. One day at one of our track days is about 1.5 to 2 hours hotlapping on track.
I know the serious guys usually do two days on a set, then sell their tyres to one of the younger guys to get another day or two out of them.
The track day I went to at Philip Island was a mixed event with all sorts of cars, and the only cars I saw with extra sets of tyres were race-prepped 911s (cage, most of the interior stripped), and one 458. Although the 458 had mechanics in Ferrari gear, so I'm not entirely sure it wasn't a case of them changing from road legal tyres to get it down there (it's a couple of hours drive from Melbourne) to something more track oriented and less road legal.
I saw TWO Holdens have to change brake pads during the day, because there's some pretty big stops and the Commodore is a heavy car. But they didn't need to change tyres. Weren't even close.
That's my experience. I could see burning a set of tyres in a day if you were drifting the back end a lot, but if you're driving to be quick with limited slip angle I'd have thought it'd be tough to completely wear a set in just one day unless there's something funny going on. I've seen people essentially trash tyres in one day because they had a bad alignment and they chewed through one edge or something, but not pure wear on a properly set up car.
Maybe the GTR R34 is way harder on tyres than I would expect, it's 4WD and quite powerful. But extrapolating from my experience tells me that you'd struggle to completely wear a set of road tyres in one track day (~2 hours drive time), and you almost certainly will not be able to do it in 25 minutes, which is what I figure 12 laps of the Alps at about 2 minutes per lap works out to. Hell, Formula 1 soft compound tyres usually last at least 10 laps or so unless the track is staggeringly abrasive.
Maybe I'm wrong, and if somebody else has experience with cars more like a GTR then that would be cool. But 25 minutes a set on factory tyres feels like it's been shortened a bit for better gameplay.
Edit: @
Bogie 19th After your 12 laps, are they wearing out or are they overheating? I play iRacing a fair bit, and while tyres never wear out in a 20-30 minute race, if you drive hard it's very easy to overheat them in 5 or 10 minutes, and the feeling is very similar. It's a mistake I've made before assuming that I was wearing my tyres where it was actually heat killing the traction. I don't want to say that you've made the same mistake, but it'd be foolish of me not to mention it. I apologise in advance if this is something you've already checked.
