This thread is just a bunch of musings and observations about tyres, mainly in endurance races.
I went out first with R : Hard tyres for the 1000km of Sukuba, which poured down for the whole 6 hours, so I quickly came back to the pits and threw on Racing : Rain. Handling wasn't much improved, the car still broke away easily on corners front and back, I was using the 4WD Skyline R33 Touring Car, and I couldn't catch the front runners. I quickly came in and pitted again, this time trying out the Racing : Intermediate tyres I've not used for a long time, or at all in GT5. These totally transformed the car. It wasn't slightly wet, it was really wet, but still the Intermediates lasted longer and handled ten times better than Rains. So what are rain tyres actually for?
I'll be trying out Rain and Inters during my 24 Hrs. Le Mans, also raining cats and dogs.
Do all Racing tyres have same wear rate??
Do hard / med / soft Racing tyres have the same wear rate?? They never used to. In GT3/4 - "SuperSoft" or Racing : Soft we're clearly grippier than Racing : Hard tyres, but lasted nowhere near as long and Medium was a noticeable compromise between them. Choose between faster lap times or less pit stops. In GT5 it doesn't seem so clear cut, as R : Soft tyres don't seem to hold the road that much better than Hards, but do increase lap times a bit, whereas the difference in wear-rate between them is barely noticeable at all. This kind of negates the point of R : Hard tyres. R : Soft do still make lap times a few seconds quicker, so why even use the less grippy Hard if they have no wear advantage?!
In the case of my 9 Hrs. of Tsukuba endurance race, running a 4WD Amuse Carbon R '04, I have even found that R : Soft tyres were outlasting R : Hard! I first ran R:Hard and found they wouldn't even last 10 laps. After my third pit I ran fast to make up time and managed to destroy the R:Hard tyres in 5 laps! Assuming that all Racing tyres had been nerfed for this race [although I don't see why as the opponent cars are all running R:hard go figure], I switched over to Sports : Soft to see if they lasted longer, which would make sense if PD were to force a handicap on Racing tyres in the advanced races and encourage the use of realistic tyres [I still don't agree that R:Hard aren't like realistic slick tyres]. Sports Soft lasted nearly 20 laps though, but I lost pace so after a couple more stops I threw on a set of Racing Soft to catch up and was flabbergasted when they lasted about 20 laps too. Back to R:Hard and they were burned in 10 laps. How can this be? I assumed it to be all in my mind, went back and checked again with the same result. Maybe because of the heat of the track, or because the surface is greasy the harder compound tyres lose grip more and spin their tread away in corners, but I don't really see the real world physics of this. Seems to me that they're confused with the tyre setups in GT5. Has their quest for realism in the updates introduced more continuity errors or is it simply a glitch on this Tsukuba? I'd love to know if this has always been the case before the updates. It's certainly never happened in previous GTs.
Do Sports tyres last longer than racing ones during endurance races? It would certainly seem the case in some. Are Racing tyres, which most people describe as having an unrealistically high rate of wear in GT5, designed like this to give a handicap against the less grippy tyres? I suppose this would be the case in real life where slicker and softer tyres are designed to sacrifice their rubber to the road to aid grip, but the expensive compounds used and higher op-temperatures might still allow them to last longer being thrashed round a track as they are than semi-racing "sports" road tyres, which might start to fail much quicker from this sort of treatment.
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