Tire Wear - The Experiment

[Jimmy_Pop]

I've had the curiosity for sometime about how the different tires wear out in comparison. So I devised a fairly controlled experiment.

Vehicle used - Shelby gt500 Mustang - full tuned
Track - Streets of Willow (for the skid pad)
Online Lobby set initially to normal tire wear and then to the fastest setting.

The test:

Out of the pits I would slow down gently to a crawl and make a U-turn and head to the skid pad at a slow pace. I would then stop at the skid pad, put it in 2nd gear and hold the gas and brake at 100%, wait for the lap timer to strike 1:00. At which point I would release the brakes with the wheel cranked to the left and once the motor reved back to redline I would shift to 3rd gear. Once the first tire (Right side rear) hit a 0 (zero) I would check the time.

The results:

On normal tire wear two runs were made with Race Softs and both yielded 1:40 or 100 seconds.
On the fastest, two runs were also made with Race Softs and both yielded 28 seconds.
Here is the quick chart. Tire type - time in seconds on fastest setting
RS - 28
RM - 34
RH - 50
SS - 48
SM - 62
SH - 94
CS - 114
CM - 142
CH - 184

Now to convert the accelerated wear to normal we use some basic math.

if 100/28 = 3.571428571428571, and round to nearest whole number we get something like:

RS - 100 (1:40)
RM - 121 (2:01)
RH - 180 (3:00)
SS - 171 (2:51)
SM - 221 (3:41)
SH - 336 (5:36)
CS - 407 (6:47)
CM - 507 (8:27)
CH - 657 (10:57)

There you have it folks, a comparison of how the tires stack up according to wear.

* This experiment was far from perfect, but gives a general idea.*

 

[Jimmy_Pop]

Here is a more detailed analysis between each grade:

 

[kolio]

So cool, but what is up with SS tire wear?

 

[Griffith500]

There's an interesting power relationship for tyre wear within each tyre type, rather than a gradual progression according to the alleged "grip multiplier" across all "compounds" theory.

With that in mind, it'd be interesting to compare these results with laptime results for all tyres from an equivalent test.

Great work 👍

 

[Jimmy_Pop]

I also found it interesting with the SS wearing quicker.

Have at it for lap times. Thats a project.

I will say that the tires wore down more quickly in the lower tread remaining, bear in mind that the tires were heated fully and still is not a perfect test. But since I used the same car and test, it should be close enough to compare.

 

[GTPorsche]

This info will be useful if I ever have to determine how many laps I can run with a set of tires if I ever find myself doing a burnout around a track.

 

[TheFlyingScot]

Nice little experiment you have here. I pretty much knew that the grippier the tyre, the more wear it would endure but this confirms it in a very concise way. Interesting to see what happens with SS especially.

Good job and maybe one day this will come in handy for me in the future. 👍

 

[MatskiMonk]

The thing to do next would be repeat the experiment, and change a variable. Different car, or try with S3 weight reduction, or set a different time of day (track-temp), and then see if you still get the same correlation.

Then, a more representative test, including legit laptimes, and then see if the relationship between the tyres is still the same.

You could also use the datalogger to compare wheelspeed to ground speed, locically when there is a differential between the two the tyre will wear, so you could see a pattern there.

All of which will probably tell you, that the better the tyre is, the faster it will wear

 

[Johnnypenso]

It's an interesting test, but doesn't necessarily correlate with tire wear under racing conditions.

 

[Griffith500]

This info will be useful if I ever have to determine how many laps I can run with a set of tires if I ever find myself doing a burnout around a track.

It's an interesting test, but doesn't necessarily correlate with tire wear under racing conditions.

It should be easy to test whether it is representative or not. You're effectively implying there is a temperature sensitivity in the wear model that differs from type to type and compound to compound, somehow, and for some reason.

Occam's razor and all that.

 

[Johnnypenso]

It should be easy to test whether it is representative or not. You're effectively implying there is a temperature sensitivity in the wear model that differs from type to type and compound to compound, somehow, and for some reason.

Occam's razor and all that.

Not really implying anything, just that it isn't real life and we have no idea how PD programmed tire wear. There could be factors for extreme heat, longitudinal vs. lateral tire wear, or any number of other things. The only way to prove anything conclusively would be to test it on the track. I'm sure the OP is on the right track, it an ingenious idea actually.

 

[eran0004]

I had a feeling that SS wears faster than RH. That's the experience I had with the "endurance" events in GT6.

 

[Jimmy_Pop]

It's an interesting test, but doesn't necessarily correlate with tire wear under racing conditions.

Exactly why I said it wasn't perfect. Maybe one day I will run a test of such hot lapping. The problem I see with comparing lateral grip or lap times is that the suspension would need to be tweaked to each grade for maximum grjp.

 

[Griffith500]

Not really implying anything, just that it isn't real life and we have no idea how PD programmed tire wear. There could be factors for extreme heat, longitudinal vs. lateral tire wear, or any number of other things. The only way to prove anything conclusively would be to test it on the track. I'm sure the OP is on the right track, it an ingenious idea actually.

Following a standard scientific approach, we could quite quickly figure out what the model takes into account and what it ignores, what it distinguishes between and what it lumps together.

The one way you could never properly discern any of that is by doing standard "track tests". That's a "real deal Joe" fallacy.

We need more tests like this one, controlling some other parameter. Track tests will serve as a sanity check once we start to build our model of PD's model.

 

[chill]

It's an interesting test, but doesn't necessarily correlate with tire wear under racing conditions.

very nice picture you have there
look at mine

 

[Illopp00]

So does anyone believe a real GT500 tires would last more than 6mins of constant burning out before being completely destroyed?

 

[kolio]

It's an interesting test, but doesn't necessarily correlate with tire wear under racing conditions.

I was thinking the same after I took a second read over the OP.

Even though it does not simulate race conditions, do you think it would compare the same when you put it in race conditions? I mean, tire wear is tire wear. If one compound wears faster than the other, it will under any circumstance right?

 

[Griffith500]

The real question is: "what is tyre wear?"

The simple answer is obviously an annoying reduction in grip and, hence, pace or balance etc.

That could be material abrasion exposing a less grippy compound, or altering the tread pattern.
Or it could be thermal degradation of the surface "gripping" material, altering its surface chemistry with the road.
Additionally there's the structural aspects of the tyre carcass itself to consider (for example the modes of vibration of the tyre are critical to how it "grips" and "lets go"), which may suffer fatigue - I'd put blistering and other partial delaminations in the structural category, although it has an ultimately thermal cause (technically "grip" itself is a "thermal" phenomenon, at a given scale).

I would speculate that material abrasion and thermal degradation are the major contributors to the perception of "wear", although I don't understand the full implications of the structural aspects (e.g. I think "graining" is a structural consequence of thermal torture).

 

[Johnnypenso]

I was thinking the same after I took a second read over the OP.

Even though it does not simulate race conditions, do you think it would compare the same when you put it in race conditions? I mean, tire wear is tire wear. If one compound wears faster than the other, it will under any circumstance right?

I think it will translate quite closely, maybe perfectly, but I don't think we can yet conclude "tire wear is tire wear" without further data.

 

[raven214]

This is very cool! 👍👍 I've often wondered if tire wear was linear from compound to compound, or if there was overlap between classes - just couldn't figure out an easy way to test it. Now we just need a good test to find if grip levels follow a similar pattern.

 

[chill]

i didn'T see any change on tire wear from one compound to another one
the only thing i noticed was that i would go slower on harder compound but it will still wear out at the same speed
usualy on harder compound you should do more laps
but it's not the case

 

[Johnnypenso]

i didn'T see any change on tire wear from one compound to another one
the only thing i noticed was that i would go slower on harder compound but it will still wear out at the same speed
usualy on harder compound you should do more laps
but it's not the case

If that's true your game is defective because there is a massive difference in tire wear from the softest to the hardest compounds. Unless you're saying something completely different??

 

[chill]

If that's true your game is defective because there is a massive difference in tire wear from the softest to the hardest compounds. Unless you're saying something completely different??

yes it's supposed to have a differnce but there is not
any compound i have, the tires will wear out at the same rate
it would be great if it could be more like reality

 

[Le_Manuz]

It should be easy to test whether it is representative or not. You're effectively implying there is a temperature sensitivity in the wear model that differs from type to type and compound to compound, somehow, and for some reason.

Occam's razor and all that.

It won't be really representative if he is "burning" the tires
i don't think that a few outside degrees difference will matter in his testing scenario
maybe a larger circle without letting the tires go orange/red will be more representative
but i don't know any place where you can do such thing

 

[Griffith500]

It won't be really representative if he is "burning" the tires
i don't think that a few outside degrees difference will matter in his testing scenario
maybe a larger circle without letting the tires go orange/red will be more representative
but i don't know any place where you can do such thing

I was referring to the orange \ red tyre indicators in respect of "temperature sensitivity", and a low speed "burnout" would be a smaller change (before trying lateral grip tests) which could potentially rule out temperature effects far more quickly.

 

[Mini Stiggy]

yes it's supposed to have a differnce but there is not
any compound i have, the tires will wear out at the same rate
it would be great if it could be more like reality

No, they don't.

 

[332i]

yes it's supposed to have a differnce but there is not
any compound i have, the tires will wear out at the same rate
it would be great if it could be more like reality

You're not pushing hard enough.

 

[Mt. Lynx]

If you could calculate percentage of wear over time, I think we actually would have a useful chart even for race conditions.

 

[Jimmy_Pop]

If you could calculate percentage of wear over time, I think we actually would have a useful chart even for race conditions.

It could be done, it would take a whole lot longer than the 20 or so minutes my little experiment took. I think that picking a track that has a fairly good balance of turns (for even wear) and car that would be drivable accross all tire grades, it could be a good test. Maybe I will do it, with a little help from the folks here of how you all think the best way to do it, I can put it together on my next paid holiday! (just the thought of getting paid to play video games makes me

 

[GTP_CargoRatt]

yes it's supposed to have a differnce but there is not
any compound i have, the tires will wear out at the same rate
it would be great if it could be more like reality

If that's the case, then you're doing something wrong, or right. Different compounds wear at different rates, period. Like @332i said, maybe you are not driving hard enough to notice much of a difference.