Too all:
I've commented on the great "first-effort" job Kieth and Nanda did Saturday,
5-20. However there is some food for thought, to be absorbed from our
experience, about course layout/length and it's impact on tire wear at
3-Com.
The length of the course (in time), yesterday, and the many, low speed,
tight corners really increased tire wear per run. Although 3-Com is,
technically, asphalt, it is quite abrasive due to the type of slurry coat.
My tire wear measurement numbers, over the years, indicate that the 3-Com
lot is the most abrasive lot we use following McClellan cement and the
Castle cement site. By comparison Stockton wear is about 2/3 that of 3-Com
and Mather wear is less than half. The old Oakland surface , before the new
slurry (for which I don't yet have creditable numbers), was our lowest-wear
site, slightly better than Mather.
Before yesterday's event, we'd run 2900 seconds (60 runs @ 48 sec) on our
tires on various surfaces (2 at Mather, 2 at Stockton, 1 at new-Oakland, 1
at Laguna and 2 at 3-Com)
The bottom line of this comment is that we ran tires with only 58% of the
tread worn before the event and corded 3 of 4 on Saturday. If you ignore the
tread rubber under the grooves, before you hit cord, the last 42% of tread
was worn off in 13 runs totaling 1080 seconds.
Do the arithmetic, 18% of our runs used 42+% of the tires. At that rate we'd
get an average of 9, 4 run, entries per set of $900 tires.
The message here is: In the future, don't plan to run long and tight corner
courses on agressive surfaces like 3-Com, it's too expensive!!!
Don
|