I went with "race" tires, just because they where the exact same price as a set of all seasons, so I figured what the hell. At the level I'm at right now, I think I'm still too much of a noob to use them to there full potential. Thinking about it I would much rather learn on a set of street tires, and when I reached the absolute limit of the car and tires then I would upgrade to a set of race tires. I don't think you can appreciate a mod like that until you've reached the cars limit on street tires.

and if you drive your car to the max on the streets like me and my MINI friends then you are way ahead..!

Two cases in point here, at Hawthorne I got my ass kicked by an STi on V710's. I couldn't come close to matching his times.

Poiunt number two, Pat Riley's S2000. For the whole season he has ran on race tires. I can usually come within 1.5 second of his time. Which gives me the win due to the T modifier. Then on Sunday at Squaw Valley, Pat ran on his street tires. Pat was in average of tow seconds behind me. So, based on this unscientific analysis. I would say that race tires do give you an advantage. In Pat's case, it would seem to give him a 3.5 second faster car.

Agh! I see these kinds of comparisons, and it makes me break out into PMS! At least you qualified it by saying it was an unscientific analysis.

Pat has a RWD and you have an AWD. For Squaw we were at elevation, I think the turbo cars 'suffered' a bit less than non-aspirated. Course layout sometimes affects lap times. Condition of tires, condition of the driver (:lol: ), suspension setup, etc etc etc, affect lap times.

Unless you have quite a bit more data I'd have to take the comment '... give him a 3.5 second faster car" with a grain of salt. No offense.

There is a lot of conditional statements in my post. I am glad you saw them. I am just pointing out, from my point of view, it would appear to be advantagous to run on race tires. Of cource, I can't afford them anyway.

The problem with this direct comparison is that typically, people who normally run on race tires get slower when they switch to street tires, because they tend to overdrive, or underdrive trying to fidn the much lower limits of the street tires. You don't think Pat's V710s give him 3.5 seconds do you?

Again, the statistics from nationally competitive cars/drivers say it is actually about 2.5 seconds per 60 second run. It might well be more or less in an average driver, or averagly(is that a word?) prepared car.

That is another huge contributor to confusion in our region. Very few of the cars are extremly well prepared, and fewer still to the limits of the rules and to make it worse, many of those arent nationally competitive in the class they are running in anyway...

So is a 85% prepared SM Subaru that isn't necessarily even a competitive car in that class nationally on street tires faster than a 64% prepared BP Corvette, or 81% prepared EM Rotafire, or a 92% prepared ASP Corvette on race tires with different drivers using a handicapping system that is largely or partially based on one man's beliefs/opinions and and a somewhat statistically accurate street tire multiplier?

When somebody can plug that into their graphing calculator and get a meaningful answer, come get me. Otherwise, shut up and drive. If you want to realy see if you are faster than someone, pick a car and both drive it, then do the same with the other car. Then at least for those two vehicles on those days, you will have an answer... Or not.