Shaving Azenis 615
 

A question for the people who ran on Azenis 615 this season. Did you see the need for shaving them? Or would you leave them at full tread depth?

Thanks in advance.

If you're going to nationals and are able to drive well enough to make use of the extra .1s it might gain you, then I would say there's a need. But I would rather have the extra tire life over the course of the season.

Dean will chime in though to tell you that shaved tires wear more evenly and therefore you get just about as much life out of them as un-shaved tires, but I still think the full depth tires last longer w/o giving up too much. Not to mention that they'll work in the wet.

Yeah, thats what I was thinking.

I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a significant advantage to gain from shaving. I certainly am not quite to the level where a .1s difference would matter, and I would prefer to last a whole season on one set rather than sacrafice tire life for minimal gain (esp. at my level).

Shaved tires will not overheat as quickly as unshaved.

It's 6 of one, 1/2 a dozen of the other.

I think the best wearing tires Scott or I ever ran were the two sets I had shaved before nationals.

They also have probably the best grip for the life of the tire.

Driving on Sue's tires the past few events, I'm pretty sure that even though there is plenty of tread left, the number of heat cycles combined with street driving has significantly reduced their grippyness, so did we really gain anything by being able to run them for an entire season?

If I wanted to have a reasonably fast season, I would plan on two sets of tires. Idealy on two sets of rims so after they lost their autocross stickyness, I could still tear them up at track events. I'd probably shave them to 4-5/32nds if they were street tires. Silver State Retread, or whatever they changed their name to is probably who I would use.