THE most important part of your car is your tires. And yes, I did mean to capitalize “THE.” Tires are literally the only part of your car that touches the ground (and if anything else is touching the ground, you should probably have that fixed). This means that ALL inputs depend DIRECTLY on your tires. Power, braking, and steering are all conditioned upon the amount of traction that your tires provide to you.

What Tires Should You Get?

So the next question is, What Tires to Get? Without getting into any specifics, the best thing to do is to pick a tire based on what you plan to do with your car. My Honda CRX is my daily driver, and it has the cheapest, nastiest 13 inch tires one can find. In fact, these were “found” on the car when I bought it, and I haven’t bothered to upgrade (though I did swap my Miata tires onto the CRX when I took it to the track). The reason is that these 13 inch tires do everything I need them to do as I tootle around town.

For my Miata, my tire needs are much more specific. I need tires that will give me maximum performance on the racetrack. So, I pretty much choose a tire from the highest “performance rating” category. I’ve tried a few different ones, and each has their pros and cons. The important thing though is that I get the right type of tire - maximum performance summer tire.

The Black Magic and Voodoo of Automobile Tires

And now we get to why I have selected this title: when you try to maximize your tire traction at the track, different brands and models of tires follow some general principles, but pretty much each march to their own beat.

It really boils down to the current technology used in making automobile tires. Tire is just a rubber compound with different grooves cut into it. And each of the different compounds used in each of the different tire models on the market today behaves differently in pretty much every aspect. These differences are compounded further by variations in tread design. Lets take a walk through some of the major areas:

Tire Pressure

Once you’ve mounted your tires and had your wheels aligned, tire pressure is the only thing left that you have any control over with your tires. But the control you do have is HUGE. All tires perform best in a certain pressure range, and the more precise you can be, the better.

The part that changes with different tire models is what pressure is optimal. And, of course, there really is no way to know without actually trying a bunch of different pressures at the track. And then as the ambient temperature changes, you may find that your tire has a different optimum pressure, or that it becomes more sensitive to overheating at certain pressures. My recommendation is to find out what other people have used for any given tire on your car and use that as a starting point. Note that it is IMPERATIVE that the data is for the same size tire, and the same type of car. The reason is that different size tires (even of the same model) can prefer different pressures with different applications. And the type of car goes to a different application as well. Tires will behave differently with heavier cars than with lighter cars. So, if you can’t get data for your car, data for a similar size and weight car will suffice as a starting point.

As a general rule, I find that a hot pressure between 36 - 40 psi works well for most cars with most tires in most situations. But not necessarily. If you have no other data, aim for that range then check your pressure IMMEDIATELY when you get off the track. Then adjust your pressure accordingly depending on how the tires are faring.

Rain = More Pressure

This is the one general rule that still holds pretty well: higher pressure gives more grip in the wet. The basic explanation is that a tire gets stiffer as its pressure goes up, which helps to displace the water and push it into the tread grooves. You are usually best to bump up the pressure a little bit in the wet. But again, you have to experiment with YOUR setup.

And don’t forget that your tires will not get as hot in the wet, and thus they won’t gain as much pressure as they would in the dry. The reason for this is that 1) rain is effectively an infinite heat sink, acting to keep your tires cooler and 2) because there is less traction available, there are less forces generated through the tire and thus it works less and produces less heat.

How does the tire deal with heat?

Speaking of heat, a very important characteristic of tires on the track is how well they deal with heat. Tires generate heat with each rotation as the tire conforms to the road, and also as a tire is pushed hard. At the track, these combine and basically heat your tires up over the course of each session. The ability of a tire to deal with this built up heat becomes VERY important as your session wears on. A tire that overheats usually becomes “greasy” feeling, and generally has less traction overall. This can be compounded by overinflation (see above).

Note that heavier cars work tires harder, and thus heat up tires more. So, all else being equal, the exact same tires will heat up (and overheat) faster on a heavier car. For that reason, certain tires that may perform great on a Miata can be terrible on heavier cars. This was a common gripe with Falken Azenis. They perform fine on my Miata, but larger cars overheat them too fast. (Note too that these larger cars generally take a different size tire, so you now have 2 factors that are different: 1) car weight and 2) tire size, which is basically a different tire for the purposes of this article)

Snow Traction

We talk about snow tires elsewhere, so suffice it to say that they have their very own types of rubber compounds and their very own types of tread, both of which make them ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS IN THE SUMMER! Feel and steering response will be terrible, and they will wear EXTREMELY fast.